A Great Way Off

The speech has three parts and she has been working on the first one for eleven months.

Part one is the acknowledgement. That is the hard one, and it has to be exactly right: not defensive, not grovelling, not so brief that it looks casual and not so long that it looks like a performance. She has about nine versions of part one. She can recite them all.

Part two is the explanation, which she has decided to cut, and then reinstated, and then cut again, because she cannot work out whether context is honesty or excuse making. It is currently cut. It will probably come back.

Part three is what she is asking for, and this is the part that changes most, because on a good day she asks for a great deal and on a bad day she asks only to be allowed to be somewhere near.

Eleven months of drafting, and she has not made the journey.

That is what nobody sees. From the outside she looks like somebody who has moved on. She is functioning. She is good company. And on the inside there is a document being endlessly revised, and the revision has quietly become a substitute for the walk.

Because here is the thing about a speech: while you are still writing it, you have not yet failed to deliver it. The drafting is safe. The road is not.

That is you on the eleventh version.

You've been polishing an opening line for the better part of a year, and you have told yourself that the polishing is preparation. It is not, quite. It is a way of being on the road without being on the road, and it can go on indefinitely, because there is no version of part one that will ever be good enough to release you.

The father moves while the distance is still enormous

This is the most famous story Jesus told and I am not going to improve it, because it does not need it. I only want you to look at where the father is standing when it happens.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

When he was yet a great way off. Stop there before anything else.

The son has a speech. The text tells us so earlier: he composed it while he was still in the far country, and it is a good speech, and it has an acknowledgement and a request in it, and he rehearsed it on the road exactly as you have been doing. Luke 15 keeps every word of it, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve the rehearsing as well as the running.

And the father sees him at a distance that the text calls great, which means the son is still small on the horizon, and he is nowhere near close enough for a word to be exchanged.

You are visible from a distance you would not have thought counted, and the seeing happens long before the speaking, and I am not warming this up: Luke 15:20 puts the compassion at a great way off, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can bring that to somebody on version eleven.

Now count the verbs in the order they come. Saw. Had compassion. Ran. Fell on his neck. Kissed him. Five actions, all of them the father's, all of them before a single word of the speech is delivered.

By the time the son opens his mouth, the entire welcome has already happened to him physically. The speech, when it finally comes out, is spoken into a shoulder by somebody already being held.

You have a welcome that arrives before the wording, and the words you have been polishing were never the mechanism, which is written into the sequence rather than into my sympathy for eleven months, with the Spirit of God able to get a document out of somebody's hands.

And here is what I love most about that verse and I say it as somebody who overprepares everything. The father ran. In that culture, an older man did not run. Running required gathering up your robe, which was undignified, and dignity was not a small thing to those men. He gave up his dignity to shorten the wait by about ninety seconds.

Ninety seconds. That is what the running was worth to him.

This welcome is already in motion toward you while you are still working on part one, because Scripture puts the running before the speech, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that down a track in the late afternoon.