Four Seconds Nobody Can See

He has prayed about his temper more than he has prayed about anything else in his life.

Nine years, if you count from the evening it frightened his son. Not violence. He has never once raised a hand to anybody and he wants that understood. But a voice that arrives before he does, and a face, and a way of going very quiet afterwards that his wife says is worse than the shouting.

He has fasted about it. He has told two other men about it. He has sat in the car outside his own house on more than one occasion working out how to go in and be a different person than he was that morning.

And he still has it. That is the fact he stands on and there is no getting round it. He had it on Sunday.

But there is something he noticed in the spring and has not told anybody, because saying it out loud would sound like an excuse.

There is a gap now.

Four seconds, maybe. Between the thing happening and the voice arriving. It used to be nothing at all, no gap whatsoever, the way a light comes on. Now there is a small stretch of time in which he is aware that he is about to, and roughly one time in four he does not.

Nobody can see it. His wife cannot see it, because from where she is standing the outcome is identical three times out of four. His son cannot see it. If you asked anybody in that house whether their father has changed they would give you a careful, loyal answer, and it would mean no.

And he cannot decide whether four seconds is a mercy or a joke.

The kingdom grows in stages and most of them are invisible

Before anything else, let me honor the nine years.

A man who keeps praying about the same thing for nine years is not a man who has failed at prayer. He is a man who has refused to make peace with something, which is rarer than you think and costs more than anybody watching knows. Nothing here is going to tell you those years did not land.

But hear this, and take it as a settled thing rather than as consolation: those four seconds are real ground and you have taken them. That is not my generous reading of a hard situation, it is what stands written in the fourth chapter of Mark, where the Lord describes His own kingdom growing in a man the way a seed grows in the dark, and the same Holy Spirit who gave that parable is the one who put four seconds into you that nobody in your house can see.

Read it and notice how much of it is hidden on purpose.

This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain: first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.Mark 4:26-28

Though he does not know how. The man in that parable is not given visibility. He is specifically described as not understanding the mechanism, and the growth happens anyway, in stages, and the stages are named.

First the stalk. Not first the harvest. There is a stage in the Lord's own description of His own work that looks like almost nothing, and He calls it the first thing rather than the failure of the last thing.

Four seconds is a stalk. You have been holding it up against a harvest and calling it a joke, and this is yours right now rather than pending anything you have yet to achieve: the growth is real, in the dark, on His schedule, because the written word says the soil produces all by itself and the Spirit of God is the one at work in you both to will and to act.

Now the careful part, because this is where a piece like this could hurt you.

Nobody is handing you a rate. There is no correct number of seconds and there is no month by which the gap should have become eight, and if you take one thing from this and turn it into a new measurement you will be back in the car outside your own house within the fortnight.

And nobody is telling you the temper does not matter. It does. It happened on Sunday and there is a real cost to the people you live with, and you already know that better than any article could tell you. There is nothing here excusing it.

What is being said is this: what you called nothing is a stage, and the fact that it is invisible to your household is not evidence against it. Scripture says the seed grows while the man sleeps, and the Holy Spirit does not report to the room for confirmation before He works.