Four Minutes About The Weather

Kestner's Feed and Seed keeps its mineral blocks on a pallet just inside the roll up door, and on the second Saturday in March, Alma Prewitt was standing over that pallet counting them, because she had made the drive twice already that month and was not going to make it a third time over four blocks.

Dale runs the counter. He has run it since his father ran it. He has the specific gift of asking a real question in the middle of a transaction, which is rarer than people think, and while he was writing her ticket he asked it.

Where are you going to church these days, Alma.

He did not mean anything by it. That part matters. He was not fishing, he was not keeping score, and he had no argument he was walking her toward. It was the same tone he uses to ask about a calf that scoured in January. Same open face.

And Alma Prewitt, who has read her Bible through eleven times, who prayed her husband through two surgeries and her son through worse, who could once have told you exactly what she was and what she held and who she stood with, looked down at the ticket book and said, boy, we needed that rain, didn't we.

Four minutes. She gave that man four minutes about rain. She gave him the inch and a half that came Tuesday night, the field down on Bell Road that still will not drain, what hay does if it keeps up, the way March has come in wrong three years running now. She was good at it. She could have gone six.

She carried the blocks out two at a time, set them in the bed of the truck, and sat behind the wheel in the lot with the rain starting again on the windshield. And she thought: I just talked about the weather for four minutes so I would not have to answer a man who was being kind to me.

Then, because she is honest, she thought the next thing, which was worse.

I did not have an answer ready. That is why.

She used to. There had been a sentence, a good one, with a name in it and a whole position standing behind it and four more sentences ready to go if anybody wanted them. That apparatus was gone. Not knocked down, not disproved, just gone, the way a barn goes: nobody pushes it over, it quits being a barn one winter at a time.

So she sat there with the wipers off and did the arithmetic on what she actually still had. What she had was short. It was so short that hearing it in her own head, in a truck in a feed store lot, embarrassed her.

I believe Him.

That was the whole inventory.

She waited for it to feel like enough. It did not feel like enough. But she noticed something on the road home, and she noticed it the way you notice a fence line you have driven past a thousand times: she had not had to stop and check whether it was true.

What Martha said at the edge of town

Four days after her brother was buried, Martha walked out to the edge of Bethany to meet Jesus on the road, which is its own kind of courage, and He told her that her brother would rise again. She gave Him the long answer. She said she knew he would rise in the resurrection at the last day, and she was right, and it was good doctrine well held by a woman who had clearly been taught.

Then He moved the ground under the conversation. He said He is the resurrection and the life, and He asked her one question. Believest thou this.

Watch what she does, because this is the hinge. She does not restate the doctrine back to Him. She does not produce the framework she had a minute ago. She hands Him a Person and stops.

You have an answer in your mouth already, and it is not a fragment of something better. What is written in John 11:27 is that Martha said yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, and the Holy Spirit preserved that line out of everything said on that road, then carried it to you this morning instead of some longer one. He kept the short one.

Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.John 11:27

Now notice what Jesus did not do with it. He did not ask her to expand. He did not say, and what else. He did not send her back for the part she left out. He took what she said, and He walked to the tomb, and He raised her brother in front of her.

Nobody in this house is going to tell you that a short answer means the doctrine does not matter. It matters. Martha's first reply was true and she was right to have it and right to know it well, and if you go on reading and go on learning for the next thirty years you are doing exactly the right thing. The short answer is not a replacement for the long one. It is the part of the long one that was holding the weight the whole time.

You have not been demoted. What is promised in Philippians 1:6 is that He who began a good work carries it on to completion, and it is His Spirit doing the carrying, not the quality of your explaining. The learning is a gift and it is still open to you. The standing does not depend on how much of it you can produce at a counter on a Saturday.

And those four minutes about the rain were not a betrayal. Hear that plainly. That was an inventory problem, not a loyalty problem. The man asking was kind and the question was fair and the sentence you used to give him was a good sentence, honestly meant, built by people who loved God. You did not turn on any of it. You reached for a shelf and found the shelf empty, and a person who finds an empty shelf talks about rain.

There is a night in John 6 where a crowd walks away from Jesus and He turns to the twelve and asks whether they mean to go too. Peter, who is never short of words, comes up with eight of them. Lord, to whom shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life. That is not a position paper. That is a man saying he has nowhere else to be, and it was received exactly as it stood.