Flawless at Eleven, Gone at Five

At eleven o'clock on a Sunday she is genuinely excellent.

Thirty-five people in a side room with the good chairs, and she can take them through the whole of it without notes. She can hold two hard things next to each other without collapsing either one. She has a way of asking a question that makes the person who asked it feel clever. Somebody drove forty minutes for that room this year, which she has never mentioned to anybody.

She is not proud about it in the ugly way. She just knows what she is good at.

And at ten past five on that same Sunday she said something to her son in the hallway that she would not want any of those thirty-five people to have heard.

Not shouting. Worse than shouting. The precise, quiet, accurate sentence that finds the exact place, delivered in about four seconds, because she was tired and he had left it until Sunday again and she had been up since six.

He went upstairs. She stood in the hallway.

And the thought that arrived was the one that always arrives, and it is the reason she has started dreading the good chairs: you are a fraud, and one day somebody is going to find out.

She has been carrying that since about March. She has not told anybody, because who exactly do you tell. The people in the side room think you have it worked out. That is rather the arrangement.

Scripture tells a teacher to let his progress be seen

Let me deal with the hallway first, because it deserves an honest word and not a wave.

That sentence landed on your son and it cost him something, and you know that better than anybody could tell you. Nothing here is going to smooth that over or explain it away. Go and put it right, plainly, and do not attach a lecture to the apology.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as let-off: you are not a fraud. Knowing more than you have yet become is not a con. That is not my convenient reading of a bad Sunday, it is what stands written to Timothy, who is told to give himself wholly to these things so that everyone may see his progress, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that instruction was in the side room at eleven and in the hallway at five.

Read the sentence Paul writes to a young man leading a church.

Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress.1 Timothy 4:15

Your progress. Written to a teacher. Written to a man already standing in front of a congregation, and taken for granted, in one clause, that he has some distance still to travel.

Sit with how strange that is by the standards you have been holding yourself to. Nobody is telling Timothy to have arrived before he teaches. He is told to be visibly on the way.

So the gap between what you can explain at eleven and what you can do at five is not a fraud charge. It is the ordinary condition of every teacher in the New Testament, and this is yours right now rather than something to earn back: you are permitted to be a person who is still getting better, because the written word assumes it of a leader and the Spirit of God is the one closing the distance at His own rate.

Now the mechanism, because there is one and it will help you.

Knowing always arrives before becoming. Always, in everything. A person can explain the theory of a language months before their mouth will do it under pressure at speed, and nobody calls that dishonesty. The gap is not corruption, it is just what happens when the mind travels faster than the character.

And your five o'clock self is not the real you underneath the eleven o'clock performance. That is the lie in the hallway and it is worth naming. Both are you. One of them is tired, and tiredness does not reveal a person's true nature, whatever you have heard. It reveals what a person does when the reserves are gone, which is a different question and a fairer one.

The word says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Holy Spirit is not scandalized by a woman at ten past five who has been up since six.