A Question at a Bedside

Twenty-two years, and it was a Tuesday at four in the afternoon on a ward he has been on more times than he can count.

The man is eighty-three. Not a member. He came twice, years ago, with a sister who has since died, and somebody had put his name down and somebody else had rung.

They had talked about the sister for a while. Then about a boat. He had been in the merchant navy and there was a long thing about Rotterdam that took about twenty minutes and was the best part of the afternoon for both of them.

And then the old man looked at the ceiling and said, in exactly the same voice: how do you know somebody did not make it all up?

Not bitter. Not a challenge. A man with about four weeks left asking a genuine question of the only person in the building who might be expected to have thought about it.

And he had nothing.

He had twenty-two years. He had two degrees and about nine hundred books in a house he can no longer park outside. And what he said was that he understood why a person might wonder, and that he had wondered himself, and that he had found in the end that it held.

The old man said: right.

And they went back to Rotterdam for a bit and then he left.

That was in February. The old man died on the eleventh of March and he took the funeral and it was a good funeral and the family were kind about it.

And he has not been able to put down the twenty seconds in the corridor afterwards, standing by the hand gel with his coat over his arm, thinking: I have been doing this for twenty-two years and I had nothing for him.

The account tells you what it is for and does not claim to be everything

Let me deal with the corridor first, because it has been stood in since February and the verdict passed there was wrong.

You did not have nothing. You had Rotterdam.

Twenty minutes on a ward with a man nobody had visited, about a port he had not thought about in fifty years, given by somebody with somewhere else to be. That is not the warm-up before the real work. In that room, that afternoon, that was the work, and it is the reason he trusted you enough to ask the other thing at all.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: you were not short of an answer because there is none, and what you gave him was closer to right than what you have been wishing you had said. That is not my kind reading of a hard February, it is what stands written at the end of John's twentieth chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that page was on the ward at four in the afternoon.

Read what the writer says he was doing, because it is the plainest statement of purpose in any of the accounts.

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.John 20:30-31

Two things there, and the second one is the one you needed in that corridor.

Many other signs which are not recorded. He tells you outright that this is a selection and not an archive. He is not pretending to hand over everything.

And these are written that you may believe. He names his own purpose. He is not neutral and he says so, in writing, at the end, which is a more honest thing than most documents ever do.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better bedside: what you carry has never claimed to be a proof, because the written word states its own purpose and its own limits on its final page, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been working through a selection rather than an archive for two thousand years.

And here is what the old man was asking for, which you have not let yourself see.

He was not asking for evidence. A man with four weeks does not want a bibliography. He was asking whether the person sitting beside him had actually looked, or whether it was a job.

And you told him you had wondered yourself. That is the true answer and it is the one he wanted, and he said right, and then he took you back to Rotterdam, which is what a man does when he has been answered and is finished with a subject.