I Am the One Leaving

Months rather than years. That was the sentence, on a Tuesday, from a man who did not enjoy saying it.

You asked how many and he said he would not put a number on it and that anybody who did would be guessing, and you respected him for that and told him so.

You are sixty-eight. You feel, at this moment, largely all right, which is the strangest part of the whole thing and which nobody warned you about. You have been out to the shop this morning. You did the crossword.

And you have made a list, because you have made lists your entire life and it did not occur to you to stop now.

The will is done. The passwords are written out. The thing with the pension has been sorted, and your daughter has the folder, and you have had the conversation about what you do and do not want, which took eleven minutes and which everybody had been dreading for a fortnight.

The list is finished. That is what you noticed on Thursday.

Everything on it is done, and there are months left, and you are sitting in a chair in your own front room at four in the afternoon with a voice that works perfectly well and no idea what to do with it.

Because the one thing not on any list is this: at some point, and nobody can tell you when, the voice goes. Or the clarity. Or both. And whatever you were going to say to these people, you will have already either said or not said by then.

Paul wrote it down himself and kept working

Sit forward a bit. I am not going to be careful with you; you have had a fortnight of careful and I suspect you are sick of it.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit does not require me to soften an estimate: months rather than years is what the man said and I am not going to improve on it. And I am not going to tell you what happens next in the sense of dates, because your consultant declined to guess and he knows a great deal more about it than I do.

Nobody in your family is on trial in this article either, including whoever has been most frightened and least useful, which there always is.

Now come and look at a letter written by a man in exactly your position, who knew it, and said so.

For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.2 Timothy 4:6-7

Paul, in a cell, writing to a younger man, with no expectation of getting out.

Look at what he does with the knowledge. He states it plainly, in writing, without drama: the time of my departure is at hand. No euphemism. He does not say if.

And then look at what the letter does afterward, because most people stop reading at verse eight. He asks Timothy to come before winter. He asks for his cloak, which he left at Troas, and for the books, and especially the parchments. He mentions who has been helpful and who has not. He sends greetings to individual people by name.

A man who knows the time of his departure is at hand spends the rest of the letter on his cloak, his books, and the people he wants to name.

A man in your position is not required to become somebody else, and the last letter in the New Testament was written by one who stayed exactly himself. That is not me flattering a man in an armchair. That is what is written, and what Paul actually spends that letter doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a front room at four in the afternoon.

Here is the thing this whole site is about, and it turns round for you, and you will see the turn immediately because you are a man who reads carefully.

Every other article here is written for somebody who has to say something over a person who is going. You are the one going. Which means the last blessing in this house is yours to give, and there is nobody else who can give it, and it has an expiry date on it that nobody can read.

You have a voice today that works perfectly well, and it is the only thing left on any list that nobody else can do for you. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, finished, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven through a sixty-eight year old man in an armchair, which means the weight is His and the voice is yours and you are only being asked for one of them.

What the finished list is telling you

Now let me name it precisely, because you noticed something real on Thursday and you have not yet drawn the conclusion. What is written draws it, and the Spirit is not hurrying you toward it.

Every item you completed was a transfer. The will transfers property. The passwords transfer access. The folder transfers information. The conversation about what you do and do not want transfers a decision.

All of it is you handing over things that can be written down, and you did every one of them efficiently, because you have been a competent man your whole life and competence is how you have loved this family. His Spirit has no complaint about a competent man.

And the list is finished because the transferable things have run out.

What is left is the one category that cannot be written into a folder, and which is why you are sitting in a chair at four in the afternoon feeling oddly unemployed: the things that have to be said, out loud, by you, to a face, and carried by His Spirit once you have said them.

That is not a failure of your list. It is the list doing its job and then reaching its edge.

God has not asked you to arrange everything, and He has never once made a man's competence the thing his family is left standing on. It is written that the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27), and underneath is a place no folder was ever going to reach, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this front room with you.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you how long you have got. Nobody knows and your consultant said so and I am not going to be less honest than he was. And I am not telling you that saying this makes anything easier for the people you say it to. It may make it harder on the day and easier for thirty years, and I am not going to pretend to know which.

What I can put in your hands is this: there is one thing left that only you can do, you can still do it today, and it does not require you to be well. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twenty words said over one person this week is worth more than every item on that finished list.