Nine Years Of Study

There are nine notebooks and they are good.

Hebrew, mostly. Then a long run on the second temple period, then two years on the letters, and a whole one, closely written, on a single chapter that he still does not think he has finished with.

He is not a show off. He has never once said any of this in a way designed to impress anybody. He goes to a Thursday study where he says less than most people, and when he does say something it is usually a question.

He reads at night. He has done for nine years, since the winter his mother died and he could not sleep and picked something up.

Here is what he noticed, on a Sunday, doing nothing in particular.

Every single person who has ever received anything from those nine years is a person capable of discussing it back with him. The Thursday group. Two friends who read the same things. A man online he has never met who is better at Hebrew than he is. His own son, occasionally, who is polite about it.

Nine years of study, circulating entirely among people who can return the serve.

And there is a home about a mile away where his aunt spent her last eighteen months, and he went, and he liked the staff, and he has not been back since the funeral.

There are people in that lounge who cannot follow a sentence to the end of it. Nobody in there can discuss anything with him. Nothing he says in that room would come back.

The cause which I knew not I searched out

Job, defending his own life in the long middle of that book, gives a description of what he used to be, and it is one of the most precise pictures of practical mercy anywhere in Scripture.

I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out.Job 29:15-16

Take that at the desk. You have exactly the right kind of thing to carry a mile down the road. The word says I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying where nothing comes back.

Eyes to the blind. Feet to the lame.

He is not describing charity in the abstract. He is describing lending a faculty. Being, for a person who lacks something, the thing they lack, at the point where they lack it.

And then that final clause, which is the one for a man with nine notebooks: the cause which I knew not I searched out. Job used his mind on a matter that was not his, for people who could not have argued with him about it and would not have known whether he had done it well.

That is study going where it cannot be discussed back.

So take this at your desk, and know it is not my rebuke, it is what is written: what you have is already the right kind of thing to carry into a room like that. His word says I was eyes to the blind and feet was I to the lame, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that lounge a mile away in your mind since the funeral.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was an Oxford fellow, a serious scholar, who read constantly and edited and abridged and published for fifty years.

And he spent an enormous proportion of his life in prisons, in pit villages and at deathbeds, with people who could not read.

He did not stop being a scholar. He never once threw the learning away and he was working on texts into his eighties. What he did was carry it out of the rooms where it could be admired and into the rooms where it could only be used, and mostly what it looked like there was reading out loud to people who could not read, and answering questions that were not clever.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the learning went in the direction where nothing came back.