A Time To Put It Down

The drawer is the one under the phone table and there is a piece of paper in it that has been there since the second Sunday in October.

Cal wrote it out longhand, which he has not done in years, and folded it once, and put it in there, and shut the drawer, and he has not opened it since and he can recite what it says.

Twelve years is a long time to have the same conversation with the same three men at the same table after the same monthly thing.

It started properly in 2013, over a genuine question, and he was not wrong about the thing he said and he still is not, and that is the part that has made this hard. If he had been wrong it would have been simpler. He could have found out and stopped.

Instead he has been substantially right for twelve years, at a table, once a month, with men he has known since he was nineteen and would drive anywhere for at three in the morning.

He noticed it in the summer. He was driving home from one of them and he could not remember one single thing anybody had said about anything else the entire evening.

Then he went back over the last few. Same. Then he went back over the year.

He got to about a decade before he stopped counting, and he said the specific thing that got him was that he could not remember the last time he had told any of those three men anything about his own life.

They know his positions. All of them. They could state his case for him.

Two of them do not know he has been sleeping badly since February.

He wrote the question out longhand on the second Sunday in October, folded it once, put it in the drawer under the phone table, and did not tell anybody, and he says the strangest thing about it was that shutting the drawer felt like something happening rather than something not happening.

You may have a table. It might be a table or a family or a comment section or a room in your own head. And it may not be about being wrong, and that is exactly what makes it hard to stop, because being right feels like a reason to continue. And nobody has ever told you that putting it down is a season rather than a surrender.

Silence And Speech Are In The Same List

There is a list in Ecclesiastes that everybody knows the beginning of and hardly anybody reads to the end of. It runs through fourteen pairs, and one of the pairs is this.

"A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak."Ecclesiastes 3:7

Look at the pairing, because the pairing is the whole content.

Silence and speech are on the same list, in the same grammar, given the same weight. Neither one is the failure of the other. Nothing in that chapter suggests that keeping silence is what you do when you have run out of speech, or that it is the lesser half of the pair.

It is a time. That is the word. A season, in which a thing that is right in one season is not right in this one, and the change is not a change of conviction.

You are being offered a season rather than a defeat. Ecclesiastes 3 sets silence beside speech without ranking them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and shuts a drawer under a phone table on a Sunday in October.

That distinction is worth having precisely because Cal is not wrong. Nothing in that verse asks a man to stop believing something. It asks whether this is the season for that particular thing to be in his mouth, which is an entirely different question, and it is one a person can answer without giving up an inch of what they hold.

You have been given a way to stop that costs you none of your convictions. That is what the written word does with speech and silence, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a pair of clauses land in a man driving home who cannot remember what anybody said.

This Site Is Not Ruling On Your Table

Now say it plainly, because a page about putting an argument down which sides against you in passing would be worthless.

This site does not settle the question you wrote on that piece of paper. It does not lean. It has no view on whether you or the other three had the better of it, and it is not going to imply one by tone or by silence.

Your position is not being asked for and it is not being adjusted. Whatever is in that drawer is exactly as it was when you put it in there, and this page is not a way of getting you to drop it.

What is on offer is much smaller. It is that you can honor God today while it stays in the drawer, and that the drawer is not a concession.

You can put this down and lose nothing that you actually hold. It is written that as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, which is addressed to somebody's own conduct and never to their conclusions, and His Spirit is the one who has been in the truck with you on every drive home.

And say the guard, since this whole site runs on it. Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no position, no side, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all. You are as fully His with the paper in the drawer and the question wide open, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from being a verdict wearing a friendly coat.