He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.
Colossians 1:28-29 (NIV)
The Half We Keep Back
A delivery driver in his fifties keeps a folded slip of paper in the door pocket with the awning colors on it, because he cannot read the stop names. It has four street names copied out in his wife’s handwriting. He knows the stops by the color of an awning and by which yard has the flag out, and when dispatch says a street name he repeats it back and keeps the sound of it. He has never told anybody at work that he cannot read. When somebody finally sits with him once a week in the back room of a library, the work turns out to be the same page and the same short words, and the word through never behaves.
The Colossians get one long sentence about what Paul actually does with his days. We proclaim him, Paul writes, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ.
A few people would be manageable. The ones who learn quickly, the ones who thank you afterward, and you would be finished by Christmas. Paul says everyone, and everyone takes in the man who asks the same question every month and the woman who takes correction badly and then doesn’t call for a while.
There is a warning folded into that sentence. The driver moves forward in the week somebody says to him, you are guessing at that word, go back and look at it. That is a small humiliation for a grown man to take from anybody, and he takes it every week. One person ever said a thing like that to me plainly, and I didn’t like her for a week.
Most of us aren’t formally teaching anybody. The encouraging half still leaves us easily, and the other half stays where it is, because saying it to a person we have to see again on Sunday costs something.
Whatever it takes out of you, the strength for it comes from somewhere else. Paul says Christ works that energy powerfully in him, and he says it while calling the work a struggle.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, one person has been getting the easy half from me for months, the warm things said easily and the true one kept back where it costs me nothing. Give me the sentence this week, and the nerve to say it while I’m looking at him, and whatever strength for it you’re willing to work in me.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
