The Meeting I Did Not Want to Go To

There was a meeting about the lane in March and I knew the outcome before I went and I went anyway, and I am going to write about the going rather than about the lane.

Eleven people. The decision had been made in a different room by three of them about two weeks earlier, which everybody knew and nobody said, and the meeting was the part where it gets minuted.

I had one point to make. It was a good point and it was about drainage and it was correct, and it was not going to change the outcome and I knew that when I got in the truck.

So the question was not whether I could win. It was whether I was going to be in that room with a thing I had not said, for the following four years, every time I drove up that lane.

I want to describe the two days before, because that is where the whole of it lived. I was short with Toby about a boot. I did the accounts twice. I rehearsed a version of the point in the milking parlor that was much better than the one I actually made, and I had a little imaginary conversation where a man agreed with me, and neither of those is a thing a grown man ought to admit to and both of them happened.

I made the point. It took about ninety seconds. Two people nodded and one of them was Hollis, and the vote went the way everybody knew it was going to go, eight to three.

Here is the strange part and it is the only reason this is worth writing down. I felt fine. Not triumphant, because there was nothing to be triumphant about, and not bitter either, and I have thought about that since and I think what I actually felt was that I was no longer carrying it.

Bucky was tied to the post by the hall gate for the whole hour and had eaten the top off a small hedge belonging to the parish, which is possibly the only submission to that meeting that had any effect at all.

Toby asked me in the truck if we had won, and I said no, and he said, oh. And then he said, did you say the thing, and I said yes, and he said good, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned, and I have thought about the order of his two questions ever since.

A question asked twice and left standing

David opens a psalm with three statements and two questions, and he does not answer either question.

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? (Psalm 27:1)

Whom shall I fear. He is not asking for information. He is doing the thing a person does when they have said the first half of the sentence out loud and found that the second half no longer has an obvious answer.

And the two questions are put after the statements rather than before them, which is the whole method. He does not begin by asking whether he is afraid. He begins with three facts about God and then finds that the fear has nowhere obvious to stand.

You are being handed the facts before the question, and Psalm 27:1 puts the statements first on purpose. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that order do something rather than merely be tidy.

The word light in that first clause is worth sitting with for anybody going into a room. A person walking into a meeting is mostly worried about what they cannot see: what has been said, what has been decided, who has spoken to whom.

You have not been sent into a room in the dark. The written word calls Him light before it calls Him strength, and His Spirit is what makes that order useful to somebody who is more worried about what they do not know than about what they cannot do.

What he actually asks for

Later in that psalm he names the one thing he wants and it is not the outcome.

One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)

He is in trouble. There are enemies in this psalm and a war in it, and the one thing he asks for is a place to be and something to look at.

That reframes what a person is doing when they go into a room they cannot change. The asking is not about the vote. It is about being somewhere and being able to keep looking at something.

You are able to want one thing that a vote cannot touch. Psalm 27:4 asks for dwelling and beholding in the middle of a genuine crisis, and the Spirit of God is what makes that read as sturdy rather than as evasive.

And the psalm ends by saying the thing out loud to itself: wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart.

You have been told to wait and been given the courage in the same sentence. Psalm 27:14 puts them together rather than making one the price of the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a psalm into a truck in a village.