Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.
1 Timothy 4:12 (NIV)
Set the Example Now
The arc goes on before the sun does. Two of them work the same seam from opposite ends, hoods down, and the light between them is blue and hard enough that they’ve never had a good look at each other’s faces. Both have been on this building since February. At the gas station they’d walk right past each other.
When the inspector comes through, he puts his light on the seam and follows it end to end. He never asks which half belongs to the man who’s been doing this thirty years and which to the one who started in the spring. He couldn’t tell from the bead, and the hoods take care of the rest.
Timothy has things to command and teach among the believers while he waits for Paul to get there. He’s young enough that people are going to hold it against him, and Paul’s answer to that is to put him further out in front. Set an example for the believers, he tells him: in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.
That is a great deal to ask of a young man standing in front of people whose first thought about him is his age, and Paul asks it anyway. He wants Timothy seen. The men and women who were ready to discount him get to watch him be patient with someone difficult.
I’m sure of this and I can’t prove it. Respect happens to people before they decide on it, and they notice afterward that it already happened. So if you’re the youngest one in the room, or the newest, Paul’s answer to Timothy belongs to you as well. How you talk and how you act are available today, and so is love.
They knock off at two. The older one tells the kid to leave the last eighteen inches until morning, when the metal will be cold all the way through, and the kid says he’d rather finish it now.
A Prayer to Remember
We’re about to walk into rooms where our opinion gets heard last. Give us speech we won’t have to take back. Let our conduct match it when the week gets long. Give us love for the people who won’t take us seriously yet. And when we would rather defend ourselves, slow us down.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
