Rudy Practices Every Single Morning

I want to describe what Rudy actually does, because people say he cannot crow as though that were the whole of the information.

He gets up before anybody. He goes to the post by the corner of the shed, which is the correct post and is the highest thing in that part of the yard. He gets his feet right, which takes him about four seconds and which he does properly. He puts his head back.

And then the noise happens, and the noise is not a crow.

Then he does the turn on the spot, which I believe is embarrassment and which my dad thinks is just a thing he does. And then he gets down, and he goes off, and about twenty three hours later he does the whole thing again.

Every single morning. He has never missed one. Not in the whole time I have been alive, and my dad says not before that either.

Here is the question I have been carrying about it and I have not been able to put down. He is not getting better. That is the fact of it. This is not a story about somebody practicing and eventually succeeding, and I am not going to write one, because there is not one and there is never going to be one.

So what is he doing.

I asked Dad and he thought about it for about a day and then said, at supper, out of nowhere, that Rudy is not practicing. He said practicing means aiming at a thing you have not got yet, and that what Rudy is doing is keeping.

I asked what he means by keeping. He said that a rooster who stopped going to the post would be a different rooster, and that going to the post is who he is rather than a thing he is trying to achieve, and that this is true of quite a lot of what people do and almost nobody notices.

Bucky sleeps through it every single day. He has never once been woken by Rudy, which is fair, and which is also the joke everybody in this parish makes and I have stopped finding it funny.

Three instructions and not one of them is exciting

Paul writes a sentence to a whole church and every clause in it is aimed downward rather than upward.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you. (1 Thessalonians 4:11)

Study to be quiet. The word for study there is about being ambitious, striving, making it your aim. So the instruction is to be ambitious about being quiet, which is a sentence built to collapse in on itself and does it on purpose.

Then mind your own business, and then work with your hands, and there is not one word in the verse about growth or influence or reaching anybody.

You are being given an aim that is deliberately unimpressive, and 1 Thessalonians 4:11 uses an ambition word about being quiet. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as a real target rather than as a joke.

The reason given in the next verse is worth having, because it is not about the person doing it.

That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing. (1 Thessalonians 4:12)

The point is a life that holds up when people outside look at it, and a life that is not short of anything. Both of those are built out of showing up rather than out of achieving.

You have been aimed at something that is made entirely of repetition. The written word gives quietness and hands and one's own business as the whole target, and His Spirit is what makes an unimpressive aim feel like an actual assignment.

Keeping rather than practicing

There is a word used about Anna in Luke that is one of the strangest and best in the whole gospel.

And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. (Luke 2:37)

Departed not. That is the whole account of about sixty years of a woman's life, given in two words, and it is not a description of achievement, it is a description of not leaving.

And she is in the record because she was there on one particular day when a couple came in with a baby. Sixty years of not departing and then one afternoon that would not have happened if she had gone home.

You are somewhere by continuing rather than by arriving. Luke 2:37 sums up sixty years as departed not, and the Spirit of God is what makes that read as a life rather than as a waiting room.

Nobody would have described her as getting better at anything. She had a post and she went to it.

You have been given something to keep rather than something to master. Luke 2:38 has her speaking at the exact hour it mattered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a temple into a yard at first light.