The Deep Man I Admired

Ross has a notebook and the notebook is the problem, though it took him eleven years to see that.

It started well. There is a man at his church, quite a bit older, who says things in a way Ross has never been able to. Not showy. Not long. But when that man speaks, something settles in the room, and afterward people tend to be quieter than they were before.

So Ross started writing it down.

At first it was one line every few months, because that is how often something arrived that he wanted to keep. Then it was more. Then he started noticing the shape of how the man built a sentence, and writing that down too, in his own words, so he could work out how it was done.

Then, and this is the part he did not see happening, he started using them.

Not stealing exactly. He would take the shape and put his own thing inside it. And it worked. People responded. Twice somebody told him afterward that what he said had helped, and both times he went home and felt something that was not gladness and that he could not name for years.

He is thirty-eight now and he has about four hundred entries.

And in February, in a car park after a men's breakfast, he had a thought that arrived fully formed and would not go away: that he has spent eleven years trying to become one particular man, and that in eleven years he has never once asked God to make him anything.

He has been apprenticing himself to a person.

And the man in question does not know. Ross has never told him, and would be embarrassed to, and the man would be horrified, because he is a good man and has no notion that anybody has been studying him for over a decade.

And you may have somebody like that. Not a hero exactly, just a shape you have been quietly growing toward, so slowly that you would never have called it that.

The Psalms have a man deliberately putting the great things down

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

You were never supposed to become somebody else. You never were. Scripture has a man writing down, on purpose, that he does not occupy himself with things too great for him, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a notebook full of somebody else's shapes, who forms a person. Set it down here in this car park. It is heavy and it has four hundred entries in it.

Now hear it, and hear that the man writing it is a king.

My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.Psalm 131:1

I do not concern myself with great matters.

That is not a man who could not reach them. This is David. He could reach most things. It is a man who has looked at the great matters and deliberately declined them, and written down that he declined them, and put it in the book so that everybody would know.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say the great matters are bad. He says they are not his, and he is at peace about it in writing.

You are allowed that. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who calms a soul, and He has never once required a man to grow into somebody else's shape first.

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 man you admire is doing anything wrong. He is not. What he has is real, it settles rooms, and God gave it to him and uses it every week in that building.

And nothing here says you should never learn from anybody. That would be foolish, and Scripture is full of people learning from people on purpose. Watching a man who is further along is one of the ordinary ways God grows somebody, and eleven years of paying attention was not wasted.

The point is narrower and it is about the notebook. Somewhere in there, learning became copying, and copying became a project to become him, and Scripture has a king writing down that he has stopped reaching for what is not his, and His Spirit is the one who quiets a person into that.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The thing you felt in the car both times, the one that was not gladness, has a name.

It was the feeling of being thanked for something that was not yours. His Spirit is the one who put your own thing in you, and He put a different one in that man on purpose, and He has never once wanted the two confused.