Their Hearts Burned While He Talked

She has tried, in order: mornings, evenings, a chair instead of the sofa, a different translation, a plan with dates on it, a plan without dates on it, no phone in the room, a candle, which she felt ridiculous about, and reading standing up.

The problem, as she has diagnosed it, is her.

She reads a paragraph and comes to at the end of it having taken in nothing. Her mind goes to the dishwasher, or to a conversation from Tuesday she is still annoyed about, or to nothing at all in a way she cannot even describe. She rereads. She loses it again. And she closes it after twenty minutes with the specific tiredness of having worked at something and produced nothing.

She is thirty-six and she has two small children and she has not slept properly since the first one, and she has never once let herself use that as an excuse because she thinks it would be one.

And underneath the four years of adjustments there is a theory she has never said out loud: a person who was properly focused would feel something. The words are fine. The reader is the fault.

Who was doing the burning

The two on the road to Emmaus say something at the end of that afternoon, and I want you to look at the grammar of it, because the grammar is the whole answer to your theory.

Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?Luke 24:32

While He talked. While He opened.

The burning is attributed entirely to what He was doing. There is no clause in that sentence about how well the two of them were listening, and there is not one word about their concentration.

And here is the detail almost nobody notices. They did not feel it at the time. Read the chapter: they walk the whole way discussing their own disappointment, they do not recognize Him, and the burning is something they identify afterward, in retrospect, once He is gone.

They could not detect it while it was happening.

You are being warmed by something you are not the operator of, and the two men on that road could not feel it in the moment either. That is not me easing a text to comfort you; Luke 24:32 puts the burning under His talking and never once under their attention, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an afternoon on a road and lays it over a woman at a kitchen table with twenty minutes and two small children.

What your concentration is actually for

Now let me take the theory apart, because four years is long enough to have carried it.

Your concentration is a faculty of a tired body. It is affected by sleep, and you have not had proper sleep in six years, and by how many small demands have been made on you since seven this morning, which is a number neither of us could count.

It is not a spiritual organ. There is no verse anywhere that makes the effect of Scripture on a person contingent on their focus, and if there were, it would be devastating news for every exhausted parent and every ill person and every grieving one, which is to say for most of the people God has ever spoken to.

You have been holding yourself responsible for a result Scripture never put in your hands. The written word says His word does not return void and gives that as a property of the word rather than of the reader, and the Holy Spirit is not held off by a mind that went to the dishwasher.

And I want to say something about the candle and the chair and the standing up, because I am not going to mock any of it. Those were the acts of a woman who wanted this badly enough to keep trying things for four years. That is not a person with an attention problem. That is somebody who has not given up on hearing from God and has been quietly punishing herself for the failure of a mechanism nobody explained to her properly.

You were never the fault, and there has never been a defect in you to correct. Scripture puts the opening of it in His hands, as it did on that road, and the Holy Spirit has been the one doing that in twenty minutes a day that felt like nothing for four years.