He Was Kind and I Felt Handled

He was not condescending. Idris has been over it perhaps thirty times and the man was never once condescending, and that is exactly the problem.

They were at a thing. Idris said something about faith in the ordinary way he says things, and the other man, who has three degrees and is genuinely one of the kindest people in that building, engaged with it properly.

He said, that is a really good instinct. He said, there is a whole tradition behind that, actually. He named it. He explained, briefly and without showing off, where the idea Idris had just expressed sits in a much larger conversation that has been going on for centuries.

It was interesting. Idris learned something. He said thank you and he meant it.

And he drove home feeling about eleven years old.

That is the part he cannot say to anybody, because there is no complaint available. The man was warm. The man was informative. The man was, if anything, more generous than he needed to be, and if Idris ever described this to a third person the third person would say he was being oversensitive and would be partly right.

But there is a difference between being met and being handled, and Idris knows exactly which one happened, and it happened kindly.

He is thirty-eight and he did not go to university and he reads a great deal less than that man reads, and he is not pretending otherwise.

What he had said was not an instinct. It was what he believes. It is not the beginning of a tradition he has not read, it is the whole of what he has, arrived at over about twenty years of an ordinary life, and it was received as promising raw material.

And you may know that drive home. Nobody may have been unkind to you either, and you may have found that being handled warmly is harder to shake off than being contradicted.

Jesus thanks the Father out loud for the direction it goes

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it home and it was never yours.

You did not bring a raw instinct into that room. You never did. Scripture has Jesus praying out loud in thanks about exactly who gets shown things, and it is the Holy Spirit, not anybody's reading, who does the revealing. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has been in the car since that evening.

Now hear it, and notice that it is a prayer of thanks rather than a complaint, and that His Spirit had it written down for people who did not go to university.

At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."Matthew 11:25

Revealed them to little children.

And He thanks the Father for it. That is not a consolation to the unlearned and it is not a swipe at the learned. It is Jesus being openly glad about the direction of the traffic.

Which tells you what kind of thing is being handed out. It is not a prize for study. It is a revealing, which is something done to a person from outside, and the people He names as receiving it are the ones with the least apparatus.

So what you said in that room was not raw material waiting for a tradition to give it shape. It was the thing itself, arriving the way Scripture says it usually arrives.

That is written, and His Spirit is the one who does the revealing, and He has never once required a reading list.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a real ditch on this side and I am not putting you in it.

Nothing here says that man was doing something wrong, or that three degrees are a spiritual disadvantage, or that the tradition he named is not worth knowing. It is worth knowing. He was right that it exists and right that it is large and you learned something and you were right to thank him.

Learning is a gift and God gives it, and Scripture in the same breath as that prayer is full of people who studied hard, and a church with no learned people in it is a church that gets things badly wrong and hurts somebody eventually, and His Spirit works through every hour they have put in.

And nothing here says you should have pushed back at him. There was nothing to push back against.

The point is only that being handled and being met are different, and Scripture puts the revealing where it puts it, and His Spirit is the one who did it in you over twenty ordinary years.

Here is the tender part. Eleven years old is the right description and it is not oversensitivity.

Something happened in that exchange that shifted you from participant to recipient, and it happened warmly, and warm is precisely why it is hard to name and hard to shake. His Spirit was in that conversation and He did not hear an instinct either.