How Many Chances Are Left

Somebody said a thing from the front about eleven months ago and it went into her like a splinter, and the person who said it would be horrified to know.

It was not even the main point. It was an aside, in a message about urgency, and what he said was that nobody has an unlimited number of opportunities to respond, and that a heart can get harder each time.

He meant it as a spur. In the room it landed as a spur, and people were moved, and it was a good meeting.

And Deborah went home and started counting.

Her sister is forty-six. There have been, by Deborah's reckoning, four clear moments in the last decade: the year of the illness, the funeral of their mother, a conversation in a parking lot in the spring that got closer than anything ever has, and one other that she does not talk about. Four. And by the arithmetic she has been carrying since that Sunday, four used means fewer left, and each one that passes makes the next one less likely, and somewhere out ahead of her sister there is a last one.

She has not mentioned this to anybody because she knows how it sounds. She would not put it to her house group. But it runs underneath everything now, and it has changed how she is with her sister on the phone, and her sister has noticed a pressure in her that was not there before and has begun keeping the calls shorter.

That is the actual damage, and it is happening now, and it is worth saying before anything else.

If you have started a countdown, hear the question. Who gave you the number you have been counting from?

What Paul says actually leads a person

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?Romans 2:4

Read the three words piled up: goodness, forbearance, longsuffering. Paul calls them riches, which is a word about abundance, and the whole rhetorical force of the sentence is that these are being underestimated by the person he is addressing.

And then the mechanism, stated plainly: the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance.

Not the shortage of opportunity. Not the pressure of a closing window. The goodness. That is what Paul names as the thing that leads a person to turn, and he names it in the middle of an argument where he could easily have used fear instead.

Deborah's countdown is built on a mechanism the verse does not describe. She has been picturing her sister as somebody running out of a limited resource. Paul describes a resource called riches, and describes it as the thing doing the leading.

You are inside a system that leads by goodness, and it is already named as riches, and the mechanism was never a shrinking allowance. I am not being soft about urgency. It is written in Romans 2:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence about what leads people and lays it on a woman doing arithmetic in a foyer.

What the preacher meant and what she heard

Now let me be fair to a man who is not here to defend himself, because Deborah is fair and would want that.

There is a real thing in Scripture about hardening. It is not invented. A person who refuses can become less able to hear over time, and that is a genuine warning and it is in the Bible and it is aimed at the person doing the refusing.

Notice where it is aimed. It is a warning to the one who is hardening, spoken to them, for their sake.

It is not a calculation given to a praying relative about somebody else's remaining allowance. It was never issued as a tool for a woman to run on her sister at a kitchen table. Deborah picked up a warning meant for one person and applied it as arithmetic to another, and she is now living inside a number that nobody gave her and that she has no way of reading.

You are not holding a real number, and it was already not yours to calculate, and nobody in that room was handed a timer. Scripture calls it the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a warning aimed at one heart from arithmetic run on another.

What the countdown is doing to the phone calls

And here is the practical damage, and it must be named because it is happening this week.

Her sister has started keeping the calls shorter. That is not because her sister has hardened. It is because there is now an atmosphere on those calls, and it has a source, and the source is a woman on the other end running a countdown she has never disclosed.

Urgency in a praying relative is felt by the other person as pressure, every time, without fail, and pressure closes people. Deborah, of all people, would never choose to be a pressure on her sister. She has become one by carrying an arithmetic she thought was faith.

You are able to be a place your sister can breathe, and the kindness is already the thing that leads. It is written that the goodness of God leads to repentance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the leading in a way that does not need a countdown running on the other end of a phone.