Two Kinds of Counting

"Bar forty-two. Altos again, and this time trust me for the beat."

Somebody laughs. A chair leg scrapes. Thirty-one people find the place on the page at thirty-one different speeds, and the hall smells of instant coffee and wet coats, because it has rained on every rehearsal night since October. The radiator under the long window ticks away to itself like it is counting something of its own.

She is second row, third in from the end, where she has stood for six years. Two bars rest. She marks them off against the seam of her coat with two fingers, chin down, the same small motion she has made since she was nine years old, and she comes in dead on the beat, and the sound goes up into the roof of that hall the way it always does, and for four bars there is nothing in her head at all.

Then the other counting starts again, because it always does.

Eight weeks. That is what the letter said, and the letter is not in her bag, because she does not need it in her bag. She has done the arithmetic on the bus. She did it again in the queue for tea at the break, holding a paper cup, nodding at something a tenor was saying about his knee. Deposit. First month up front. The van. The agency fee that nobody warns you about until you are already too far in to stop.

And you know exactly how this works, because you are doing it too, in your own room, with your own numbers. Your mouth can hold a line of music, or a shipping order, or the name of the child you are handing a reading book to, and underneath it that column runs and runs, and neither one interrupts the other, and not one person in the room has the first idea. You have got very good at it. That is the part nobody congratulates you for.

At the end they stack the chairs eight high against the wall. Somebody says see you next week. She says see you next week, and she means it, and she does not know what address she will be saying it from.

He asked them to count the other way

Before I say anything else, I want to say the true thing about that second column, because a lot of people have said untrue things about it to people like you.

The counting is not a character flaw. It is not poor planning catching up with you, and it is not you being bad with money, and it is certainly not a small faith showing itself. It is what a mind does when it is trying to protect the people it loves with a total that will not stretch. It runs the sum again because running the sum feels like doing something, and doing something is better than lying still under it. I am not going to scold a person for that. I would do it too.

But here is what it costs you, and you know this better than I do. It never once comes out different. And somewhere in the eighth week of it you started rehearsing the sentence you would have to say if anybody asked you directly, and you have polished that sentence to a shine, and the whole time your actual need has never once been said out loud to anyone at all. Scripture settles that in Luke 22:35, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

So let me put a question in front of you tonight, and it is not mine.

And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing.Luke 22:35

Look at where He is standing when He asks it. That is the last evening. He is hours away from the worst night any man has ever walked into, the bread is already broken, and He stops, and He asks His friends a question about their accounts.

Notice which way the question faces. Every question you have asked this week points forward, into the wall: how, and from where, and by when. His question points backward. When I sent you out with no money bag, no traveling bag, not even a spare pair of sandals, what did you actually go short of? I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Luke 22:35, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

And they do not say we managed. They do not say it was tight but we got by. The answer comes back in one flat word, and the word is Nothing.

He is not handing them a technique there. He is not saying the next stretch of road will look like the last one, and He says as much Himself in the very next breath, so nobody could ever sell this as a formula. What He is doing is putting a record into their hands before a hard night, because a person walking into difficulty needs to know what is true about the One walking in with them, and the fastest way to know it is to count what He has already done.

That God has not since retired. He has no former way of keeping people, no closed chapter of care that the rest of us arrived too late for. The hands that fed twelve men on a road with nothing in their pockets are the same hands today, and the same heart is behind them.

And this is the part that the hall full of singers cannot help you with, so I will say it plainly. He did not ask them about the concept of roads. He asked about theirs, the one their own feet had been on. The question in your kitchen is about yours. Your Father knows what you have need of before you ask Him, which means He is not waiting to be informed. He is waiting to be spoken to, which is a completely different thing, and the difference is the whole of tonight. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Luke 22:35, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.