The Conversation I Already Know I Should Have

Seven months. He has prayed about it more than he has prayed about anything in the last decade.

It is a conversation with one person. It is not a confrontation and nobody has done anything wicked; it is a thing that needs saying, that has needed saying since about the January before last, and that has got harder every month it has not been said.

He has asked God about it hundreds of times, and the asking has always taken one of two forms.

Show me what to say. Or: show me when.

And here is the thing he has never once been able to say to himself, until about a fortnight ago, when it arrived in the shed while he was looking for a screwdriver.

He knows what to say. He has known for seven months. He could write it in four sentences and they would be the right four sentences, and he would not change a word of them a year from now.

He has not been asking for guidance. He has been asking for a start date, and no start date has come, and every month he has not had one he has felt slightly more justified.

Seven months of the most sincere praying of his adult life, and it has functioned, without him ever intending it, as a waiting room with a door he is holding shut from the inside.

He is not a coward. That is the part that has confused him. He has done hard things. He sat with a man through a night in 2019 that most people would not have sat through.

He just cannot start this one.

He hath shewed thee, and the verb has already happened

Sit down at the table a minute, because there is one of the most famous sentences in the prophets and the tense of the first verb is doing all the work.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

He hath shewed thee.

Past tense. Completed. Before the question about what is required is even asked, the showing is reported as something that has already taken place.

And then the requirement, and look how plain it is: do justly, love mercy, walk humbly. There is nothing esoteric in that list. Nobody needs a further revelation to understand any of the three, and Micah does not offer one.

Hear this at your own table. You are not lacking guidance, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture reports the showing as finished before it names the requirement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put four sentences in you seven months ago and has not moved them since.

Now let me name what the praying has become, and I want to do it carefully because the praying was sincere and I am not going to call it a fraud.

It was real prayer, and it has become a room.

That happens, and it happens to serious people rather than to careless ones. A careless man does not pray about a hard conversation for seven months; he either has it or forgets it. It takes a man who genuinely wants to obey to build a waiting room out of obedience itself, and then to sit in it, and to feel the whole time that he is doing something rather than not doing something.

You have not been avoiding this. You have been sincerely preparing for it, for seven months, with nothing left to prepare.

Hear this too, and let it get to the shed. You are not being disobedient, and Scripture is what says so rather than my judgement of you. What is written puts the showing in the past and asks only for the doing, and the Spirit of God has never once withheld a start date from a man He had already given the words to.

And let me be plain about what this is not, because this category can be handled badly.

Nothing here promises that the conversation goes well. It might not. He might take it badly, or say something you have to carry for a year, and there is no formula in this article or anywhere else that produces a good outcome from a hard conversation.

You are not being asked to produce the outcome. The written word never handed it to you and the Holy Spirit is not asking for it. The outcome is His. You are being asked for four sentences you have had since the January before last.