The Eleventh Draft Of One Sentence

The file is called version eleven, which is honest of him, because some men would have started calling it final at about six.

It is not long. Three sentences, if you are generous about the middle one. He could say the whole thing out loud in twenty seconds.

Two years.

Version one was written in a hurry on a Sunday night and had a genuine problem in it, which he identified on the Monday: it said more than he actually knew, and he does not do that. So he cut it back, and version two was accurate, and version two was cold.

Version three fixed the coldness and reintroduced a small imprecision. Version four fixed the imprecision. Version five was version four with a better second sentence. He can account for all eleven. Each one is a real improvement on the one before it, and he could defend every change in front of anybody.

And that is the trouble, because a man who can defend every change can go on making them forever.

Version eleven is good. He knows it is good. It is more careful than anything he has written in years, and there is nothing in it that overstates, nothing that could be misread by somebody looking to misread it, nothing he would have to walk back.

It has never left the house.

Not once, in two years, in any of its eleven forms. Nobody it concerns has ever heard any version of it, including the imperfect early ones, which were, it should be said plainly, entirely usable.

He tells himself he is being careful. And he is being careful. That is the confusing part: this is not a man dressing up cowardice as diligence, this is a genuinely careful man doing genuine care, and the care has quietly become the whole of the activity.

If you asked him what version twelve would fix, he would go quiet.

He does not have an answer to that. He has looked for one, more than once, late, with the lamp on.

And you have a draft too. Maybe not written down. But you have refined something in your head until it is very good, and it has never once been let out.

He said I do not know how to speak, and he was answered about the sending

There is a young man in Jeremiah with an objection so reasonable that most of us would accept it on his behalf.

He is told he is appointed, and he says: I do not know how to speak, I am only a youth. That is not false modesty. He is young, and he is not a trained speaker, and everything he says about himself is accurate.

Here is the answer.

But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a youth'; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak."Jeremiah 1:7

Watch where the weight lands in that sentence. Not on his ability. Not on his preparation, and not on the quality of his phrasing.

To all to whom I send you, you shall go.

The qualification is the sending. It was always the sending. His job in that arrangement is to be a man who goes and opens his mouth, and the content is described as something supplied rather than something produced.

You are sent, and being sent is the whole of your standing in this, and no draft has ever added one thing to it. It is written, whatever I command you, you shall speak (Jeremiah 1:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies in the hour what a person could not have written in two years, which is exactly why the supply was never the thing you were short of.

Now let us honor the care, because it is real and it is rare.

You cut version one because it said more than you knew. That is a serious virtue and there are not many people who do it. Scripture is severe about words spoken presumptuously in God's name, and a man who feels the weight of that is a man who ought to be trusted with something.

So none of the eleven drafts are being called vanity here, and you are not being told that carefulness was your sin.

You have been faithful with the weight of words for two years, and that faithfulness is not being taken from you, it is being sent somewhere. Scripture says the tongue has the power of life and death (Proverbs 18:21), and it is the Holy Spirit who has made a man feel that so keenly, which is a gift and not a fault, and gifts are given to be spent.

Here is the mechanism, and it has a name.

Revision is infinite. There is no draft that cannot be improved, because language never fits reality exactly, and a mind trained to see the gap will always see the gap. So precision cannot be the exit condition, because precision has no floor and no ceiling, and a man waiting for it is waiting for a thing that does not occur.

The exit condition is the sending. It always was. And the sending happened two years ago.

You have already been released, and you have been standing at an open door revising a note about walking through it. It is written that God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and love and self control (2 Timothy 1:7), and the Spirit named there is not a Spirit of better wording, and He has been at your elbow through all eleven of them.

And one last thing, about which draft.

It does not have to be the eleventh. Any of them. Version four would have done the work two years ago and version four is still sitting in the folder being perfectly serviceable.

You have permission to send an earlier draft, and an adequate thing that arrives outranks an excellent thing that stays in a folder. Scripture says the letter kills but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6), and it is His Spirit who carries a plain sentence into a person, which is a thing that has never once depended on the elegance of the second clause.