Four Dates He Has Outlived

The first one he remembers properly he was twenty two and there were badges.

There was a chart in the church porch and a man came and spoke on a Thursday and there was a genuine seriousness about it that he has never been able to sneer at, because the people involved were not clowns. A woman in that congregation gave away her mother's furniture.

Then it went past, and there was a Sunday afterward where nobody said anything, and the following week it was as though it had not happened.

That was the first. There have been three more since, at intervals, each with slightly different mathematics and the same shape, and he is sixty eight now and he has outlived every one.

He is not bitter. He wants that on the record and it is true, and the people who assume bitterness in a man his age are usually being lazy.

What he is, is done. He has stopped listening. Not to God, exactly, and this is the part he cannot untangle. He still goes. He still reads. But somewhere across four of those cycles he built a wall, and the wall is not selective. It keeps out the man with the mathematics, and it also keeps out most other things, including some he suspects he needed.

He put it once, to nobody, in the truck: I do not get excited about anything anybody says any more.

Sit on the tailgate. That wall was built for a reason and it is worth looking at what it is keeping out.

The delay is answered, and not by an excuse

Here is the verse, and the situation it is written into is exactly yours.

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.2 Peter 3:9

The people being addressed had noticed that nothing had happened. That is the actual context. Two thousand years ago there were already people saying, in effect, well, it has been a while.

And the answer is not defensive. It does not tell them they were wrong to notice, and it does not produce a revised schedule. It gives a reason for the time: patience, with a purpose, aimed at people who have not got there yet.

You have been living inside that patience for sixty eight years. 2 Peter 3:9 says the stretch is not slowness but purpose, and the Spirit inspired that answer for men who had already watched an expectation go by.

The wall is not the same as the discernment

Now the wall, because building something was right and what it turned into was not.

After the first one, a sensible man builds a filter. He learns that a chart in a porch and a serious tone and a woman giving away furniture do not add up to knowledge. That is discernment and it is a good thing and four cycles taught it to you thoroughly.

What happened afterward is that the filter kept growing and stopped being selective. It is now a wall, and a wall does not distinguish. It keeps out the man with the mathematics, and it keeps out the woman who says a true and ordinary thing on a Tuesday, and you have noticed this and it is the reason you are still reading.

You are not cynical, and this page is not going to call you that. Nothing written anywhere condemns a man for having learned what four announcements taught him, and the Spirit is not offended by a filter, only by a house with the windows bricked up.

And the distinction is easy enough to state, though not easy to run. A filter asks: is this person claiming something nobody was given. A wall asks nothing at all.

You are still able to tell the difference, which is the whole reason this is worth saying. A man who had genuinely gone hard would not have noticed the wall or minded it, and 2 Peter 3:9 is not addressed to people who have stopped caring, and the Spirit is the one who has kept a sixty eight year old man reading and going and quietly bothered by his own bricks.

What actually failed

Here is the part that will be worth the most, and it is a separation.

Four times, a claim about when was made and did not hold. That is what failed. It is the only thing that failed.

The promise was never dated. Nobody in Scripture is given a date. The whole New Testament expectation runs on a promise with no schedule attached, and every one of the four announcements you outlived was somebody adding to it rather than reading it.

That is not a small distinction and it is not a technicality. Every single one of those four men would have told you, if pressed, that his date came out of the text. None of them did. They came out of arithmetic performed on the text by somebody who wanted an answer badly enough to build one, which is a very human thing to do and is not the same as reading.

So the thing you have quietly stopped expecting is not the thing that let you down, and nothing written anywhere ever carried one of those four dates. That is worth saying slowly, because sixty eight years is long enough for the two to have merged completely in a man.

And it is worth naming what the merging costs, because it is not only a feeling. A man who has quietly stopped expecting Christ will still go, still read and still be a decent neighbor, and nobody around him will ever know that something went out of it. The wall does not announce itself. It just means that when a true thing gets said in a room, it arrives at a surface instead of a person, and four announcements are a very expensive price to have paid for that. The Spirit is not behind that wall on the outside, and He has stayed inside it with you.

You are still holding the thing that never broke. What is written was never a timetable, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that promise standing while the announcements about it come and go.