Come Aside Was Said to Busy Men

Four times in two years he has arranged it and four times it has come apart.

The first was two nights at his brother's caravan and a ewe went down the night before. The second was a day, properly booked out, and his daughter's car went and she needed collecting from ninety miles away. The third was a morning that got eaten by a man from the water board. The fourth he does not talk about.

He is not complaining. He would want that understood. These are all ordinary things and every one of them was somebody who needed him, and he would do all four again.

But he has drawn a conclusion, and it took him about a year to notice he had drawn it.

The conclusion is that the getting away is the door, and that the door keeps being shut, and that a man in his position is therefore locked out of the thing until the farm is somebody else's problem.

He is sixty three. His son does not want the farm. On the current arrangement he gets through the door at about seventy five.

The retreat in Mark does not go to plan either

There is a scene in Mark that gets quoted at tired people constantly, and almost nobody reads the four verses after it.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

Everybody stops there. It is a lovely verse and it is on a great many walls.

Here is what happens next in the chapter. They get in the boat. The crowd sees them go, works out where they are heading, and runs round the shore on foot, and gets there first. Five thousand of them.

The retreat is ruined. Comprehensively, before it starts, by exactly the people they were getting away from.

And Jesus, seeing them, is moved with compassion, and begins to teach them many things.

The teaching does not wait for the desert place to be restored. It happens in the wrecked version of the plan, with the crowd that ruined it, and the day ends with more people fed than they had ever seen.

You are able to receive in the wrecked version of the plan, and the teaching in that chapter happens after the retreat falls apart. That is what the word actually records, not a consolation I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a man whose fourth attempt went the way it went.

The invitation was not a condition

Now the plain thing, and it is a distinction worth having.

Come ye yourselves apart is a real invitation and a kind one, and if you get two nights at that caravan you should take them and I would drive you there myself.

But an invitation is not a condition. Jesus offering rest to tired men is not the same as Jesus requiring quiet before He will speak, and the chapter itself proves it, because the rest does not happen and He teaches anyway.

You have turned a kindness into a gate. And because it is a gate you cannot get through, you have been standing outside it for two years with a diary full of canceled attempts.

And nothing about an interrupted life has ever shut you out. Scripture puts the teaching on the far side of a ruined retreat, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting at a caravan you have not got to.

Use the thing that keeps interrupting

Here is the practical piece, and it is the opposite of what you've been doing.

Stop arranging the fifth attempt. Take the thing that keeps interrupting and make it the place.

The lambing shed at four in the morning. The ninety mile drive to collect your daughter. The forty minutes with the man from the water board still to come and nothing to do but wait.

Those are not the enemy of it. Those are, on the evidence of the last two years, the most reliably recurring stretches of your entire life.

You are able to hear in the interruption itself, and the interruption has never once been the obstacle it looks like. Mark 6:34 has Him teaching the crowd that wrecked His own plan, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a lambing shed into a desert place.