The Pastor Who Ran Out of Sentences

Nineteen years and eleven months. He worked it out one night in the study, which tells you something about the state of him.

Nineteen years and eleven months of standing at the front of rooms exactly like the one he was standing in on Thursday. Hospital corridors. Kitchens with the kettle going. Front rooms with the good chairs pulled out. Gravesides in every kind of weather this county produces.

He is good at it. That is not pride; it is the assessment of about four hundred people who have been through the worst week of their lives with him beside them, and it is the only thing he would say about himself without hedging.

He has a shape for it, and the shape works. Sit down. Do not fill the silence too early. Let them talk about the person and not about the death. And then, when the moment comes, and he can feel when it comes, one sentence. Never a paragraph. One sentence that puts something solid under their feet.

He has about six of those sentences and he knows exactly which one goes where.

His wife died in January.

And every one of the six is gone. Not disproved. Gone, the way a word goes when you have said it too many times. He can hear himself saying them, in his own voice, to other people, in other rooms, and they mean nothing whatsoever standing in his own hallway at eleven at night.

The elders have been very good. The church has been very good. Somebody quoted one of his own sermons back to him in the fellowship hall in April and meant it as the kindest thing they could think of, and he had to go and stand in the parking lot.

He has not told anybody that he has stopped being able to pray in sentences. He can pray in about four words. That is all that will come.

And under all of it is the thing he cannot say to a single person in that building: he is the man they call when it goes wrong, and there is nobody whose job it is to sit with him.

If that is a study anybody has sat in at eleven at night, stay here. There is a verse for exactly this and it has been in the book the whole time.

God named a season for having nothing to say

Every minister has preached this chapter. Read the half of the verse that nobody builds a series on.

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.Ecclesiastes 3:7

There it is, sitting in the middle of the most famous list in the Bible, and it has been there the whole time. A time to keep silence. Not a failure to speak. Not a lapse in ministry. A season, named by God, in the same breath as planting and harvest and birth and death.

So the thing that has been diagnosing you at eleven at night has a Scripture standing directly against it. Wordlessness is not the collapse of a calling. It is one of the fourteen seasons, and it has the same standing in that chapter as any of the others.

You are inside a season Scripture named, and you were never in breach of anything by having nothing to say. Ecclesiastes 3:7 is the written word putting silence on the list of times God appoints, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved that half verse for a man who has run out of the other kind.

And notice something about the six sentences. They are not gone because they were false. They are gone because a sentence is a thing you hand to somebody, and there is no way to hand yourself something. That is not a defect in you. That is what the sentences were built to do, and they were built to travel in one direction.

You have not lost your ministry, and you were never the source of what was in those sentences anyway. The written word carried the weight in every one of those hospital corridors, and the Spirit of God was the one making it land, not the delivery.

The four word prayer is a prayer

Now the other thing that is quietly frightening you, and I want it named and dealt with.

Four words is not a failure of prayer. Four words is most of the praying in the Bible.

Save me. Lord, help. My God, my God, why. Into Thy hands. Jesus, remember me. Half the sentences prayed in Scripture at the worst moments in Scripture are shorter than the shortest prayer you have ever prayed in public.

And Paul writes that the Spirit Himself makes intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered, which is a description of prayer with no sentences in it at all. That is not a lesser prayer. Romans puts it forward as the prayer that gets through when a person does not know what to ask.

You are prayed for from the inside right now, and you have not been silent in that room even on the nights when nothing came. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit intercedes when the words are gone, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself doing it rather than you managing something.

A man who can only manage four words is not a man losing his faith. He is a man whose praying has been stripped down to what it actually is.

Nobody is coming to do your job for you, and that is not the whole truth

Here is the loneliest part, and I am not going to pretend it is not real.

Nobody is on the schedule for the pastor. Everybody in that building assumes somebody else is doing it. The elders assume there is a mentor somewhere. The mentor assumes the elders are close to him. The people who love you most are also the people who have been trained by nineteen years of watching you be the strong one, and they genuinely do not know how to sit down in front of you.

That is a real gap and I will not paper over it.

But hear the other half. The reason nobody in that fellowship hall knew what to do in April is not that they do not love you. It is that they have never seen you need anything, so they have no picture of it. That is the cost of nineteen years of being good at this, and it is a cost you paid on their behalf, and it is not a verdict on them or on you.

You are known all the way down by the One who has been in that study every night, and you were never as unaccompanied at eleven o'clock as the building made it look. Ecclesiastes 3:7 makes room for a wordless season, and His Spirit has been at work in every silent hour of it.