Three Positions in Fifty Years

Ross worked it out on the back of a bank envelope, which is where he works most things out.

Three. In fifty years he has been required, by people he respected, to be sure of three separate things that nobody in that building mentions any more.

He is not being unkind about any of them. Every one of the three was held by good people for good reasons and he held it himself and would have argued for it. Two of them he thinks were probably right in their way and the third he is honestly not sure about now.

What he is sure about is that all three were, at the time, the thing. The line you did not cross. The place where a person's soundness was measured.

And each of them, over about a decade, went quiet. Nobody announced it. There was no meeting. It is simply that at some point the younger ones stopped knowing it had ever been a question, and the older ones stopped bringing it up, and one Sunday Ross realized that a thing he had defended in a car park in his thirties would now need explaining before anybody could disagree with it.

He is seventy-three.

And what that has slowly done to him, and he did not see it happening, is that he has stopped putting weight on anything.

He goes. He is there every week. He is one of the men they ask. But there is a quality to how he holds things now that his wife noticed before he did, and she named it in the kitchen last winter, kindly and accurately: you agree with everybody now.

He does. Not out of cowardice. Out of arithmetic. When you have watched three certainties go quiet, you become extremely reluctant to put your foot down anywhere, in case that is the fourth.

So he has spent about fifteen years standing very lightly on everything.

And the trouble with standing lightly on everything is that a man cannot tell the difference between the furniture and the floor.

And you may know that envelope. You may have your own three, or your own two, and you may have quietly become somebody who agrees with everybody, and you may have called it wisdom.

One sentence about what did not move

Let me get one thing out of the road first, because you have been carrying it since that kitchen and it is not yours.

You are not a man with nothing to stand on. You never were. Scripture names one thing as unchanged across every generation of this, and it is the Holy Spirit, not fifty years of good judgment, who holds a man steady on it. Set it down here on the gate. It is heavy, and standing lightly on everything has been heavier than it looked.

Now hear the sentence. It is short and it is the whole point.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.Hebrews 13:8

Read where that sits, because the placement matters.

It comes right after a line telling people to remember their leaders and consider the outcome of their way of life, and right before a warning about being carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is written into a paragraph about things that come and go.

That is the context, and it is yours exactly. The letter is not pretending the weather does not change. It is naming the one thing in the middle of the weather that does not.

And He has not moved under you. Not in the decade of the first position, not in the decade of the second, and not in the fifteen years of standing lightly. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you there whether or not you were putting weight on it.

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

Nothing here says the three positions were foolish or that the people who held them were wasting their time. They were not. Good men gave real thought to all three, and two of them are probably right in their way, and a tradition that never works anything out is not humble, it is just vague.

That is what furniture is for. It is real, and you sit on it, and some of it your father chose.

And nothing here is telling you to go and put your foot down about something to prove you still can. That is not wisdom either and it is not what this is for.

The point is only that a man who cannot tell the floor from the furniture ends up trusting neither, and Scripture names one thing that does not move so that the rest can move without taking him with it, and His Spirit is the one who keeps him on it.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it the way you would. What your wife named in that kitchen is not agreeableness.

It is a man who has been careful for fifteen years about where he puts his weight, and who has quietly concluded that the safest thing is to put it nowhere, and who is tired in a way that has nothing to do with being seventy-three.