I Kept It Vague So I Could Never Finish

Corrie was very good at answering. That was the thing everybody said about her. Ask her anything and she gave you back a sentence that sounded like a plan and left the doing of it up to the weather.

I want to be more present with my mom.

I am working on the prayer thing.

I would love to get back to serving in some capacity.

Every one of those is true. Not one of them can ever be finished. And that was not an accident, although Corrie would have argued with you about it, warmly, for as long as you had.

She stayed late one evening at Joan's place, stacking the folding chairs against the porch wall after the women's supper. It was that hour when the light comes in flat and low and turns the whole yard orange, and the door was standing open, and the moths had already found the porch light.

Joan handed her the last chair and said, "So what are you actually going to do about your mother?"

Corrie said, "I want to be more present with her."

Joan said, "That is not a sentence. Say it small enough to be true."

Corrie tried again. "I am going to make more of an effort to reach out."

Joan laughed at her. Not unkindly. "No, you are not. Nobody has ever done that. Say a thing a person could actually do."

There was a long pause. Corrie stood in the open doorway with the light going orange behind her and the chairs stacked and her coat over her arm, and she looked at the floorboards, and then she said it out loud.

"I am going to drive over and sit with my mom for an hour. Not do anything. Not fix the storm door. Just sit."

And then she laughed, and there was a wobble in the laugh, because it was so small that she was embarrassed by it. She had been carrying it around for two years dressed as something enormous, and here it was, nine seconds long and doable on a Tuesday.

Joan said, "There it is."

They stood there a minute in the doorway, both of them laughing at nothing much, the way women do when something has just moved and neither of them wants to name it.

And you have an answer like that.

Not that one. Yours. The one you have given four or five times in slightly different words, the one that sounds like willingness and cannot be completed by any action available to a human being.

You did not word it that way because you are lazy. You worded it that way because a sentence with no edges can never be finished, and a thing that can never be finished can never be failed, and nobody can ever stand in a doorway and ask you how it went.

Vague is not laziness. Vague is armor.

I want to say that clearly before anything else, because the accusation people usually reach for here is the wrong one and it does damage.

Nobody who genuinely did not care would go to the trouble. It takes real skill to build a sentence that keeps a person facing the right direction forever without ever arriving. Corrie did not do that out of indifference to her mother. She did it because the specific version of it frightened her, and the general version let her keep loving her mother in her head, where nothing goes wrong.

So here is the ground, and it sits in the middle of this rather than at the end of it. One half of your covenant is God's own oath, and that half is settled, and nothing you do or fail to do this week is holding it up. The other half is your response, and it is real, and it is genuinely asked, and it is not the half the arrangement rests on. Both halves are true, and this page will not shrink either one to make the other easier.

Right now, as you read, you are free to answer God in a plain sentence, because the answer is not an audition and nobody is scoring it. James 4:8 puts the two halves of that in one line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a short verse and makes it a door somebody can actually walk through.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.James 4:8

Look at which half of that verse is His

Draw near to God. That is the ask, and it is not decorative, and I am not going to tell you it means nothing. It is an actual movement and He worded it as one.

And he will draw near to you. That is His half, and it is not a hope, it is a commitment written in the same breath as the ask, by the same hand, in the same sentence. He put His own obligation next to yours on the page so that nobody could read one without the other.

Notice what that does to the size of the ask. Drawing near does not have to be a program, because the thing it accomplishes is not accomplished by the drawing. It is accomplished by the One coming the other way. You have a covenant in which the smallest genuine move toward Him is met, and I am not softening the terms by saying so: it is what the second clause of James 4:8 says in writing, and His Spirit is what turns a written clause into the sound of somebody actually arriving.

Small enough to be true

Here is the part Corrie needed and it is the part this whole page exists for.

Let the ask be specific. Not big. Specific. Those are different words and we have been using them as if they were the same one.

A vague answer feels humble, because it is enormous and unfinishable and therefore safely beyond reproach. A specific answer feels almost insulting in its smallness. Sit with my mom for an hour. Call the woman I have been avoiding. Read one psalm out loud before I open my phone. The smallness is exactly what makes it an answer instead of an atmosphere.

Speak, for your servant hears.1 Samuel 3:10

Look at how short that is. A boy in the dark, no plan, no program, four words and a posture. That is a complete response. It was accepted.

You have permission to answer God in one sentence and stop, and the permission is not mine to grant or withhold: Scripture keeps recording short answers and keeps recording God accepting them, and the Spirit does not stand over anybody demanding a longer draft.

And nobody is timing you

One more thing that has to be said out loud in this category, because otherwise a page like this becomes a new way to be behind.

A slow answer is still an answer. A person who takes six months to say a nine second sentence has still said it, and there is nothing anywhere in the terms that grades the delay. Corrie carried hers for two years. It counted the same on the evening she said it as it would have on the first day.

I will be found by you, declares the LORD.Jeremiah 29:14

You were being drawn toward Him during the whole two years you thought you were stalling, because Jeremiah 29:14 has God committing Himself to being found rather than to being reached by a deadline, and His Spirit is patient in a way that no honest person has ever been able to explain.