The Training I Never Finished

Two years and a bit.

That is how he says it, and he says it fast, and he has said it so many times that the words have worn smooth like a coin.

He went at twenty-three. He was good at it, which is the part people never expect. He was not asked to leave and he did not fail anything. His father had a stroke in the February of the third year and there was a farm and there were two younger ones still at school, and he came home for what everybody including him assumed would be a term.

He is fifty-eight now.

And in thirty-five years he has never once been in a conversation about ministry, or theology, or who is doing what in that county, without producing the sentence. He cannot help it. Somebody will say something about training and out it will come, quickly, lightly, with a small laugh at the end of it.

I did two years and a bit. Never finished.

The laugh is the tell. The laugh is what a man puts on the end of a sentence so that nobody will ask about it.

And here is what has happened underneath, over thirty-five years, without one single day where a decision was made.

He does the funerals nobody else can face. He has sat with more dying men than the last three ministers of that parish put together. Farmers who will not talk to anybody talk to him, in a yard, leaning on a gate, about things they have never said in a building.

And he believes, entirely and privately, that he is the stand-in.

Now put him down a second.

What did you start and not finish, and how often do you still explain it?

Amos said it flatly and did not soften it

A man turns up in the wrong place saying serious things, and the priest of the local sanctuary tries to run him off, and tells him to go home and earn his bread somewhere else.

And Amos answers him, and it is one of the plainest speeches in the Bible.

I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, Go, prophesy to My people Israel.Amos 7:14 and 15

Read what he does not do.

He does not argue that he is qualified. He does not produce a lineage, and in that world lineage was the whole thing: son of a prophet was not a compliment, it meant a man trained in a company of prophets, which was the recognized route, and Amos names it and says plainly that it is not what he is.

He does not apologize either. There is no small laugh at the end of his sentence.

He states the gap, flatly, in one clause, and then he moves straight on to the only two facts that matter. What he was doing. Who came and got him.

I was tending the flock. The Lord took me.

Now hear what that means for thirty-five years of a worn smooth sentence.

You are not a stand-in. Scripture says the Lord took Amos from the flock and sent him, and the Spirit has never required a man to close a gap before He used him.

And notice the thing Amos never does, because it is the thing you have been doing since you were twenty-three. He never explains. He does not tell Amaziah why he did not train, or what happened, or that he would have if things had been different.

The gap is stated once and it is not defended, because a gap is only a wound if you keep opening it to show people.

I am not saying training is worth nothing. I will not say that and it would be a stupid thing to say. The men and women who did the years and finished them carry something real and I am glad of every one of them. This is not that argument.

I am saying that the qualification was never the qualification.

The fire this house is named for fell in 1906 in a stable in Los Angeles, and the man it fell on had been made to listen to a Bible school class through an open doorway because he was not permitted in the room. He had the least finished education of anybody in that whole story.

God has not once checked a certificate at the door of a room He intended to fill.