A Teacher Wrote It On A Report And I Believed It

You still have it. That is the part that gets me.

Not in a shoebox somewhere you never go. You know which drawer, and you could put your hand on it inside a minute, and you have read it more recently than you would tell anybody.

Shows little imagination.

Four words, in the handwriting of a woman whose face you can barely remember, about a boy of eleven, written at the end of a term in which she taught about a hundred and thirty children.

And I want to do the arithmetic out loud, because I have found that saying it plainly does something that thinking it does not.

She had you for maybe three hours a week. She wrote thirty of those reports in an evening, at a kitchen table, with the radio on. She used a phrase she had used before and would use again, because everybody writing thirty reports uses phrases twice.

And out of that, you took a finding about yourself and organized fifty years around it.

You did not do anything foolish. That is how eleven year olds work. An adult with a pen writes a thing down and the thing becomes true, and by the time a man is old enough to question it, it has stopped feeling like a sentence anybody wrote and started feeling like weather.

I have been up and down a lot of roads and this shape comes up more often than anybody would guess. A word said once about a child, still running a household forty years later.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee

God speaks to a young man who is about to argue that he is not the right sort of person for the job, and He gets in front of the argument.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. (Jeremiah 1:5, King James Version)

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.

Look at the order of that. The knowing comes before the forming. Before there was anything to observe, before a single behavior, before any teacher, any term, any report, any evidence at all, there was a knowing.

And Jeremiah's own assessment of himself arrives immediately after and gets overruled. He says he is a child and cannot speak. God does not agree with him.

You were known before there was anything for anybody to write down, and Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing before the forming rather than after the evidence. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word spoken over a young man's objection and lays it on a drawer with a school report in it.

And notice who does the ordaining in that sentence. Not the observers. Not the ones who watched and made notes.

You have an assessment that predates every other one, and it is already settled in the written word that it was made by somebody who knew you first. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who could find that report inside a minute.

The report was an evening's work

Now let me stay with the piece of paper, because I want it cut down to its real size.

That report was somebody's Tuesday evening.

I am not being unkind about her. She may have been a good teacher and she probably was. But she was writing thirty of them, at speed, about children she saw for a few hours a week, and she had no way of knowing what she was setting in motion, and if she knew now she would be horrified.

You were known before there was one thing for anybody to write down, and Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing before the forming. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an older assessment louder than a newer one.

She was not making a finding. She was filling in a box.

And this: what came out of your hands at eleven is not a measure of what is in them at sixty one, and neither is what comes out tonight. Nobody is qualified to write that sentence about anybody, and the one person who did was not trying to.

You were never assessed by anyone with the standing to assess you, and heaven has never once let a term report stand as a description of a life. Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing before the forming, and the Spirit of God is the one who cuts a piece of paper back down to a piece of paper.

And do not throw it away. I know that is what somebody would tell you to do. Burning it would give it a ceremony, and a ceremony gives it weight, and it has had quite enough weight.

You have permission to leave it in the drawer and go and work anyway, and this is yours: the ordaining in that verse came from somebody who was there first. It is written in Jeremiah 1:5 that I knew thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an older knowing louder than a newer sentence.

Twenty minutes, and do not read it

So here is the ask, and there is one instruction in it that matters.

Tonight, make something for twenty minutes. Whatever your hands go to. Use what is already in the house.

And do not go and read the report first. Not to look at it again, not to see whether it says what you remember, not to prove to yourself that it does not matter any more. Leave the drawer shut.

You have a knowing that was in place before that drawer existed, and Jeremiah 1:5 puts it before the forming and before any evidence at all. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an older sentence louder than a newer one on an ordinary evening.

Reading it before you work makes the working a response, and a response is a conversation, and that woman has been in the conversation for fifty years and does not need another turn.

It will come out badly. Fifty years of not attempting anything, and it will show in the first two minutes. Leave it bad and do not go back over it.

You are covered while it comes out poorly, and Jeremiah 1:5 is the ground under that. The written word puts the knowing before there was anything to see, and the Spirit of God is present on a porch where a man is working with a drawer left shut inside the house.