The Book I Have Not Finished

It has been in her bag since March and it has a receipt in it at page forty.

Everybody is reading it. Not everybody in the world, but everybody in the four or five conversations Amy is in most weeks, and it came up again on Tuesday, and somebody said the thing about the chapter in the middle that apparently changes everything.

And Amy said, yes, that bit.

She has not read that bit. She has read to page forty, twice, both times in the first fortnight, and since then the book has traveled about eleven hundred miles in a bag.

She is not lying to anybody. That is what she keeps telling herself and it is nearly true. She has never said she finished it. She has said yes, that bit and I know, it is so good and once, in a way that has bothered her since, I found that part quite hard actually, which was a sentence built to sound like somebody who had got there.

She is twenty-nine.

And the real problem is not the book. She worked that out in the spring in a queue.

The real problem is that she has been maintaining an impression for about four years, without ever setting out to, of being somebody a bit further along than she is. It is not a lie made of statements. It is a lie made of nods, and small agreements, and not saying I have not read that, and it has become the water she swims in.

And underneath it is a fear that she has never said to anybody, which is that the plain thing she actually has, which is not complicated and has not changed much since she was twenty-two, would not survive being seen.

So she nods.

And she carries a book eleven hundred miles with a receipt in it at page forty.

And you may have your own book. Yours may be a podcast or an author or a conversation you have been nodding through, and the nodding may have become an atmosphere rather than a decision.

The ambition Scripture recommends is almost comically modest

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

You are not behind anybody. You never were. Scripture recommends an ambition so modest that it is startling, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your position in a book, who makes anything grow in a person. Set it down here on the table. It is heavy, and eleven hundred miles is a long way to carry forty pages.

Now hear the sentence, and notice how odd the word ambition is next to what follows it.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.

That is a deliberate joke, or as near to one as that letter gets. Ambition is a word about reaching, and what it is pointed at here is quietness, minding your own business, and manual work, which are the three least impressive things anybody could aim at.

It is written to a church that was doing well and was under pressure, which is exactly the combination that produces performance.

And it is an instruction about ambition, which means it is aimed at the part of a person that wants to be seen to be somewhere, and it redirects that part downward rather than trying to kill it.

You are allowed that. Right now, at twenty-nine, with a receipt at page forty. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the growing, and He has never once checked anybody's page.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says the book is a fraud or that the people who have read it are performing. Most of them are not. It is probably a good book, somebody worked hard on it, and the chapter in the middle may well be as good as they say.

And nothing here says reading is vanity. It is not. Some of the people in those conversations have been changed by things they read and they will tell you which pages, and Scripture is not against any of it and God gives that gift on purpose.

The point is only about the nodding, and about what the nodding is protecting, and Scripture aims a person's ambition somewhere so low that there is nothing left to maintain. His Spirit is the one who has been growing the plain thing in you since you were twenty-two.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The fear underneath is the whole thing and the book is nothing.

You are afraid that what you actually have would not survive being seen, and that fear has been running four years of small nods, and it is not vanity. It is a young woman protecting something she suspects is not enough. His Spirit is the one who put it in you and He has never once thought it was thin.