The Story You Tell Well

He has told it three hundred times and he knows exactly where the laugh is.

That is the part he cannot get past. There is a laugh, about two thirds of the way in, at the bit about the parking ticket, and he knows to slow down just before it, and he knows to leave a beat after it, and he knows that if he does those two things the room will be completely silent for the last ninety seconds, which is when he tells them what happened in the hospital corridor.

It works every time. It has worked in a church, in a marquee, at two funerals and once, badly, at a wedding.

And it is true. Every word of it is true. That is not the problem.

The problem is that he came out of that corridor twenty three years ago unable to speak for about a day and a half, and now he can do the whole thing in eleven minutes with a clip mic on and be thinking about the traffic on the way home while he does it.

He said to me, quietly, at a table with the plates still on it: "I think I wore it out."

And underneath that, the sentence he did not say, which I have heard from enough people to recognize it in the dark: if the story is worn out, and the story is all I have got, then what I have got is worn out.

I want to take that apart, because it is built on a mistake about what a testimony is for.

It was never a keepsake

There is a line in Revelation about how a war gets won, and it names two things, and only two.

And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony.Revelation 12:11

Hear that over yourself now. You are carrying something that is still working. The word names the word of their testimony beside the blood of the Lamb, and it is the Holy Spirit who fires it, on the three hundredth telling as on the first.

The blood, and the word of their testimony. That is the list. Not their feelings about their testimony. Not the freshness of it. The word of it, spoken out.

Which means the thing you have been carrying around as a souvenir was never filed as a souvenir. It was issued as ordnance. And ordnance does not become inert because the man carrying it has stopped being moved by the weight of it.

So take this where you sit, and understand I am not being nice to you, I am telling you what is written: what He did in you is still doing something right now, as you read this, every time you say it out loud. His word puts your testimony beside the blood of the Lamb in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your emotional state who carries a spoken word into another person's chest.

Twenty three years ago in that corridor, He was not only doing something for you. That is the part almost nobody is told. He was loading something into you for people you had not met yet.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God in a small room he did not want to be in, while somebody read aloud out of a preface. He wrote that his heart was strangely warmed. That sentence has been quoted for nearly three hundred years, and here is what people miss: he wrote it in a journal, plainly, without much decoration, and then he got up the next morning and went to work.

He built a timetable. Small groups meeting at a fixed hour where people asked each other plain questions out loud. Preaching in fields because the buildings were shut to him. Coal mine yards at five in the morning. Prisons, endlessly, with people who could not do a thing for him in return. The name that got attached to those people was coined as an insult about their methodical habits, and they kept it because it was accurate.

He told his own strangely warmed story for the rest of his life. It did not stop working because he had said it before.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and holding both meant the story went to work rather than into a frame.

You are not required to reproduce the feeling. Take that slowly, because it is what has had you quiet at that table with the plates still on it. Nowhere is it written that a testimony must move the teller in order to move the hearer. Scripture says His word does not return void, and it is His Spirit who does the carrying, on the three hundredth telling exactly as on the first.