The Second Time Through

Every March, Colin buys eleven kinds of seed.

He is very good at it. He researches. He has a folder. He knows which ones want a cold spell first and which ones go straight in the ground and he can tell you, at length, why the ones from the garden center are inferior to the ones from the little place that only does mail order. In March his kitchen table is covered in packets and he is the happiest man in the county.

By August the garden looks like a raffle. Something has bolted, something never came up at all, two things did well and he has already lost interest in them because he is reading about a different variety for next year. Nothing out there is older than a season. He has been doing this for nine years and his garden is nine first years in a row.

At the bottom of the plot there is a fence, and over the fence there is Dennis, who is eighty one and does none of this.

Dennis has one apple tree.

It was there when he moved in. He has never planted anything else worth mentioning. He does not have a folder. And every September that tree is so heavy that he props two of the branches with fence posts, and the whole street knows, and people come to the gate with bags, and there are jars in his shed with dates on the lids going back to a decade Colin was not born in.

Colin has stood at that fence a hundred times feeling something he does not have a name for, which is not envy exactly, because he does not want the tree, he wants the thing the tree is evidence of.

This August he finally asked. He said, more or less, what is it that you do to it.

And Dennis thought about it for a while, the way he does, and said: nothing much. I prune it in the winter and I keep the grass off the base and I go and look at it. That is about the whole of it.

And Colin said, that cannot be it.

And Dennis said, well. You have to do it again next year.

He was not being clever. He does not do clever. He picked an apple and gave it to Colin over the fence and said the only difference between your garden and mine is that I have gone back to this one thing about forty times and you have gone back to nothing once.

Colin took the apple home and put it on the kitchen table next to the folder and did not eat it for three days.

Four things, in houses

There is one sentence in Scripture that describes what those first people actually did all day, and every time I read it I am struck by how short the list is.

They were devoted to the apostles' teaching and to the shared life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.Acts 2, verse 42

Hear this wherever you are sitting. You are not shallow, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts devotion in a continuing rather than in a quantity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you hungry enough to get through all of it every week without missing.

Four things.

Not forty. Nobody had a folder. There was no shelf, no queue, no plan, no library, and no way at all for a person in that room to take in anything faster than a human being can speak it out loud in a house. Their whole intake for a year would fit in what you get through on the drive to work in a fortnight.

And the word sitting on the front of that sentence is the one doing all the work. Devoted. It carries the sense of staying with, holding on to, being continually there, the way you would say a man is devoted to a job or a woman is devoted to her mother. It is not a word about intensity. It is a word about return. You cannot be devoted to something once. The word requires a second time or it is not that word.

Then look at where they did it. In houses, day by day, breaking bread from house to house. The same rooms. The same tables. The same handful of things, on repeat, in ordinary places, for years.

Nothing about that is a criticism of anybody who has a great deal. I am not going to stand here and tell a person that their bookshelf is a problem, and I am certainly not going to tell them that a large church with a hundred good things happening in it is a lesser thing than four people in a front room, because it is not, and that is not what this is about.

This is about a specific ache, and you know whether it is yours.

The ache is that you take in an enormous amount and none of it seems to have got into you. You can feel the difference between knowing about a thing and being changed by it, and you have a great deal of the first and you are hungry for the second, and you have been trying to solve it by increasing the amount, which is the one move that cannot work, because volume is not the missing ingredient. Return is.

The written word names a continuing in four things and never counts how many, and the Spirit of God has never graded anybody on volume.

Here is why, and it is the plainest mechanic in the whole spiritual life.

The first time through a thing, you get the shape of it. That is all you can get. Your mind is busy doing the work of comprehension and there is nothing left over. The second time through, comprehension is already done, and something else happens, and it is the something else that changes people. You start to notice what is not being said. You start to feel where it presses on your own life. You disagree with a bit of it. You go quiet at a bit of it. That is depth, and it does not live in new material, it lives on the second pass, and there is no way to reach it except by going back.

Nothing written anywhere puts depth in new material, and the Holy Spirit has been doing His work on the second pass all along.

Which is why devotion does not feel like progress. It never has. Going back to something you have already read looks, from outside and from inside, exactly like standing still. It has no novelty in it and it gives you nothing to say to anybody. It is the least exciting thing you could possibly do this evening.

And it is where the whole of it is kept.

Hear this too, and let it land on the pile you have already read. You have not wasted a single one of those hours, and Scripture is what says so. What is written names a stedfast continuing in four things and never once counts how many, and the Spirit of God has never measured anybody by what they got through.