The Year He Could Not Read

A lamp, a desk, and a shelf of notebooks with the spines out, and he has not opened one of them in about two years.

There are nineteen. He started the first one at twenty three.

They are not journals. They are notes. Hebrew, mostly, and Greek in the later ones, and cross references in a hand that got smaller over about a decade, and there is a system with three colors in it that he could still explain to you in four minutes.

He was not showing off. Nobody ever saw them.

The illness took eleven months out of the middle of his life and it took the concentration first, before anything else, and the concentration is the only part that has not entirely come back.

He could not read a page. Not a paragraph. He would get four lines in and lose the top of it, and then start again, and lose it again, and he did that with the same four lines for about two weeks before he stopped trying.

He does not talk about those two weeks.

And in the eleven months, in a chair, without one page, something happened that he cannot put in a notebook and would not know which color to use for.

He knows God differently. That is as close as he gets to it and it makes him uncomfortable to say even that much, because it is the kind of sentence that people who have never done any work say, and he has done a great deal of work.

And he grieves the notebooks. Both things. At the same desk.

If you built something over decades and lost the use of it and found something in the losing, you know that shelf. And you know the particular shame of it: I now know something I could not have got from nineteen notebooks, and I want the notebooks back.

The word, and then two ways of knowing

Let me sit across the desk and be exact, because you are a precise man and you have been given a lot of imprecision in two years.

The problem is not the illness. You have read the literature on it, probably more than your consultant expects, and you know what it did and in what order.

The problem is that you have arrived at a claim about God that you cannot state without sounding like the people you have spent thirty years being politely unimpressed by, and so you have not stated it, and an unstated true thing goes sour on a shelf.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean what you came out with. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It was on you in nineteen notebooks and it was on you in the two weeks with four lines, and neither the notebooks nor the illness moved it.

Now the verse, and I want you to notice that Job uses two different verbs for knowing.

I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.Job 42:5

Heard, and seen.

He is not saying the hearing was false. He is not repudiating anything he knew before. There is not one line in that book where Job's earlier knowledge of God is described as wrong, and he is called upright in the first chapter and vindicated in the last one over the men who had theories.

He is saying there are two kinds of knowing and he now has the second one, and the second one did not replace the first, it arrived on top of it.

You have a second kind of knowing that did not cancel the first, and Job puts them side by side in one verse without discarding either. Job 42:5 says heard and then says seen without a word against the hearing, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Paul calls the one who searches the deep things of God, which means both kinds of knowing had the same source.

What that book refuses to do

Now what Job does not contain, because it is the most disciplined book in the Bible on this exact subject and it will protect you.

It never explains itself to Job.

God speaks for four chapters at the end and He does not once tell Job why. He does not mention the wager. He does not say I permitted this to teach you something. Job goes to his grave, in the text, without the information the reader has.

And the men who tried to supply a reason, who are the most reasonable characters in the book and who say a great many true things, are rebuked by name at the end, and Job has to pray for them.

So a book about a man who suffered enormously and came out knowing God differently is also the book that most fiercely refuses to say the suffering was for that.

Both. In one document. For forty two chapters.

You are holding exactly what that book holds, and it holds them without joining them for forty two chapters. Job 42:7 rebukes the men who supplied reasons and Job 42:5 records the new knowing in the same chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to keep both without needing an explanation the book itself withholds.

And here is what that means for your shelf.

The eleven months did not teach you God. God is not a lesson administered through a nervous system. What happened is that you were in a chair for eleven months and He was there, and something in a man changes when he is somewhere for that long with nothing in his hands.

That is not a curriculum. That is proximity.

You were with somebody for eleven months without anything in your hands, and what came of it was not a lesson delivered. Job 42 gives the seeing without a reason attached anywhere in the book, and it is the Holy Spirit who was in the chair rather than a syllabus being worked through.

The notebooks, and what to do with the shelf

Now the shelf, because it is two feet from you and you have not touched it in two years.

You are grieving them and you should. Nineteen notebooks over thirty years is a body of work and the concentration that made it is the part that has not come back, and that is a genuine loss and it deserves the word loss.

And I am not going to tell you to open one. Not today, and not because of anything I have said.

What I would say is that they are not a rebuke. You have started reading that shelf as a monument to a man who no longer exists, and it is not that, it is thirty years of a man loving something and doing careful work about it, and the man who did that is the same man sitting at that desk.

You are the same person who filled those, and nothing in you was replaced. Job 42:5 keeps the hearing and the seeing in one man in one verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who was the source of the careful work as much as of the eleven months.

And I am not going to tell you the concentration returns. I do not know. Some of it may. And I am not going to tell you it does not matter if it does not, because it matters and you would put the phone down on anybody who said otherwise.

Both halves. The year took something real and you came out with something real.