I Threw Out More Than the Rulebook

Wendell has not been able to commit to a Tuesday in twelve years.

Not a men's breakfast. Not a class. Not a standing thing of any kind, and when his wife asked him about it once, gently, he said something about liking to keep his options open and she let it go, because she is kind and because she was there for the first part of this too.

Twelve years ago they left a place that had a rule for everything.

I am not going to take you through it, because that is not what this article is for and because you either know exactly what I mean or you do not. There was a rule about clothes and a rule about what you watched and a good deal of interest in who you married and a way the money worked that nobody explained twice.

They did not storm out. There was no scene, no letter. They stopped going, over about five months, and nobody came looking, which told them something.

And the years since have been better. He would tell you that plainly. He sleeps. His marriage is easier. He has not once missed being told what to do.

But there is a thing he has not looked at, and it came up in his back yard in the spring.

He is building a shed with his son. Grown lad, home for a fortnight. And they are doing it the way Wendell does everything now, which is by eye and by feel and by making it up as it goes, and it has a kind of pleasure in it and the boy is enjoying himself.

And on the second afternoon they get the back wall up and it is four inches out at the top.

Four inches. Over eight feet. They have to take the whole thing down.

And the boy, who is twenty-four and does not know he is saying anything, sits on the grass with a bottle of water and says, "Dad, why did we not just snap a line?"

And Wendell heard himself answer.

He said, "I do not like being told where the line is."

And then he sat down on the grass too, because he had never heard that sentence before and it had come out of him in his own voice.

He has been living out of a chalk line he refused to snap for twelve years.

Now let me ask you what went out with yours.

Because if this is you, you left with a box under your arm and there was more in it than the rulebook. There was a way of praying that they ruined for you. A hymn you cannot hear. A habit that was actually yours, that you never chose and never questioned, that you dropped in the same month because it smelled like them.

He offers a yoke

Here is a sentence that ought to be strange to us and is not, because we have heard it too often.

Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.Matthew 11:29 to 30

Read what He is actually offering.

A yoke is not freedom. A yoke is a shaped piece of timber that goes across the necks of two animals and tells them where they are going and how fast. It is the most ordinary picture of structure a farming people had.

And He does not say: I have come to take the yoke off you. He says: take Mine.

That is the whole thing, and it is worth sitting with if you have spent twelve years assuming the choice was between a rulebook and nothing. He never offered nothing. He offered a different weight, cut to a different shape, on the shoulders of somebody who is walking beside you and pulling.

Easy in that verse is a word about fit. A yoke that is easy is one that has been made for the animal wearing it and does not rub. It is not a word about the load being small.

So hear this said over you, sitting on the grass looking at a wall that is four inches out. You are free of that rulebook and you have been free of it for twelve years, and the thing that has been costing you since is not their yoke, it is the absence of any. That is written into an invitation Jesus made in His own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Helper, and He is not in the business of making a free man carry a load with no shape to it.

Now let me be careful, and I mean careful, because there are two ditches here.

I am not going to tell you that you were wrong to go, and I am not going to tell you that you were right, because I was not there. I do not know that room, I do not know those people, and a man three states away with a keyboard does not get to rule on your marriage or your church or your twelve years. Some of those people loved you. Some of those rules were somebody's honest attempt at a good thing. None of that is mine to sort out and none of it is what this article is about.

And I am not going to hand you a system. If I finished this by telling you what your week should look like I would have done to you exactly what was done to you, in a warmer voice, which is worse.

Here is the only thing I am saying.

You threw out more than the rulebook.

That is not a criticism. A man who gets out of a burning house does not stop to sort the mail. You went, and you went fast, and you took everything in reach, and twelve years later there are things in that box that were never theirs and that you have been going without.

The word says God is not a God of confusion but of peace, which is written into a chapter about a service that had got loud and shapeless, and the Spirit of God is the one who produces self-control as fruit in a person, and neither of those describes a cage.

And there is something worth knowing about the tradition this site belongs to. It wrote things down. It has a confession and a book of order and a great fondness for doing things in sequence. And in the same documents it wrote that God alone is Lord of the conscience, that no council is beyond error, and that a man is not bound by the doctrines and commandments of men.

Both hands. A shape to walk in, and a locked door between anybody's rulebook and your conscience. They put those in the same book on purpose, because they had seen what happens when a church has the first and not the second, and it is the exact thing that happened to you.