The Drawing Was Never Mine

He has files. Actual files, on the shelf behind the desk, and he would be humiliated if his friend ever saw them.

Eight years, and they are organized by objection. There is a folder for the historical questions, which was the first two years and which he handled well and which turned out not to be the real thing. There is one on suffering, which was the third and fourth year and which he did not handle well, and he knows it, and there is a conversation in there he still winces about. There is a thin one on the reliability of the text and a much thicker one that he has labeled, in his own handwriting, the actual objection, and it is thick because it is not really an objection at all, it is a marriage and a father and a great deal of history, and no folder was ever going to touch it.

Dov is sixty-three. The friend is sixty-one and they have known each other since they were nineteen, and there is nobody else in Dov's life who knows what he actually thinks about anything.

And in the last year the conversations have started to have a quality that both of them can feel and neither will name. His friend has begun to be careful with him. Kind, and careful, in the way you are careful around somebody whose enthusiasm has become a burden, and the carefulness is the worst thing that has happened in forty years of that friendship.

Dov knows it. He is not a fool. He knows he has become a man who wants something from a conversation, and that his friend can feel the want, and that a man can smell a lever from across a table.

What he does not know is how to stop, because if he stops he has abandoned the field.

If you have been arguing somebody toward God for years, hear the question. Which verse put the drawing in your hands?

Jesus names who does the drawing

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.John 6:44

The word for draw there is a strong one. It is used of hauling a net full of fish, and of drawing a sword. It is not a suggestion word or a persuasion word; it describes real force applied to something in order to move it.

And it is assigned. Except the Father which hath sent me draw him. The Father does it, and the sentence is constructed as an exclusion: nobody comes without it.

Dov has spent eight years on the drawing. That is exactly the right word for what those files are: eight years of applying real force, patiently and intelligently, in order to move a man who has not moved.

He has been doing a job that was assigned to somebody else, with equipment that was never going to be adequate to it, and he has worn himself and a forty year friendship thin doing it.

You are not the one who draws, and it is already the Father's work, and Jesus stated it as an exclusion so that nobody would try to take it on. I am not letting a serious man off caring. It is written in John 6:44, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an assignment of work and lays it on a man with folders behind his desk.

What was actually his

And now the important half, because a man like Dov will hear the first part as being told to do nothing, and that is not what is being said.

There is plenty in Scripture for him. Give a reason for the hope that is in you, when you are asked. Be ready. Speak the truth in love. Live a life that raises the question.

Look at the shape of all of those. They are responsive, they are about what he says when asked and how he lives when watched, and not one of them is move him.

The drawing is force applied to another person's interior, and that has never been available to Dov, and the eight years of trying have not failed because he did them badly. They failed because that is not a thing a human being can do, and he could not have succeeded at it with better files.

You have a real part in this and it is already a different part, and none of it was ever the moving of a man's interior. Scripture says be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear (1 Peter 3:15), and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the work that no argument has ever done.

The carefulness in the friendship

And this is the thing to act on this week, because it is the live damage.

His friend has become careful with him. That is a signal, and it is a serious one, and it is worth understanding what it means: the friendship has started to feel to his friend like a place where he is a project.

Nobody comes to God to please a man who is working on them. But a great many people, over long years, have come while sitting in the company of somebody who was simply glad to have them.

If Dov puts the files down, he does not lose the field. He gets his friend back, and his friend gets forty years of history back without a lever in it, and that is not a retreat, it is the removal of the one thing in the room that has been in the way for a year.

You are able to be his friend rather than his advocate, and the drawing is already being done by somebody else in a place you were never able to reach. It is written that no man can come except the Father draw him, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in a man of sixty-one across a table on a Thursday.