Four Minutes or Less

The phone is face up on the arm of the chair, and it lights, and he has it before the second buzz.

He is not waiting for it. That is what people get wrong about a man like this. He is not sitting there hungry for contact with a thumb hovering. He is watching a game with the sound low and half a sandwich on a plate and the light comes across the arm of the chair and his hand goes out the way your hand goes out for a glass you are about to knock over. It is not want. It is reflex, and it has been trained into him over about nine years, and it is very nearly perfect.

Four minutes. That is the number, and he could not tell you where he got it. Somewhere in there is a rule he made and never wrote down: anything that comes in gets an answer inside four minutes, and if it is going to be longer than four minutes it gets an acknowledgment inside four minutes so that the four minutes still technically holds.

His sister. The group chat about their mother's house. The guy from the men's breakfast who forwards things. A neighbor. Work, though work is not supposed to be after six and it is after six. Somebody who wants to know if he still has that pressure washer.

He is good at it. Genuinely, unusually good. People say it about him: he always gets back to you. It is close to the nicest thing anybody says about him and it is the only thing several of them say.

And underneath the four minutes is one Thursday, nine years ago, when he did not answer for four hours because he was in a hospital parking lot with his phone in the car, and he heard about it for a month. Not shouted at. Worse than that. He heard about it the way you hear about a thing forever: mentioned, brought up lightly at a table, made into a small running joke with an edge in it, so that nine years later he can still feel the shape of that month in his stomach when a message sits unread for more than about ninety seconds.

So he answers. He answers his sister at eleven at night. He answers the group chat in the parking lot before he goes into his own doctor's appointment. He answers on his birthday. He answers on the day his dog died. And every single answer is fine, and helpful, and warm, and every single one of them was owed before it was asked for, because somewhere back there he stopped being a man people talk to and started being a service they have.

He does not feel used. I want to be careful with that, because he would put the phone down and correct me. He likes these people. Most of what he does for them he would do anyway. What he feels, if he ever stopped long enough to name it, is spent. Not robbed. Spent, the way a card is spent, by people who have every right to spend it because he issued it to them himself, nine years ago, on a Thursday, out of fear.

If you are running a four minute rule of your own, I am not going to tell you to set a boundary and send a message about it. That is not what this is and I am not going to hand you a fight. You are already owned, and the owning was settled by somebody who never once collected on it in a panic. Scripture answered the ownership question at Galatians 1:10, and the Spirit brought you to it tonight on purpose.

Paul Asks It Out Loud

Paul is writing to churches that have started reviewing him, and instead of defending himself he does something better. He asks the question in front of everybody.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.Galatians 1:10

Servant there is not a hired man. The word is the one for a bondservant, somebody owned, somebody whose time is not a thing he sells in pieces because it is not his to sell. Paul picks the strongest word for belonging he has, on purpose, and then he says the thing that makes the whole verse land.

You cannot be owned twice.

That is all it says. It is not a verse about being unavailable, and it is not permission to be short with anybody, and it is certainly not a rule that you must now keep in order to be a proper servant. Paul is not building you a fence. He is telling you a fact about property. A man belongs to one house. If he is still working to please the whole street, he has quietly moved out of the house he was in and nobody announced it.

And notice the tense on that last clause. If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. Present. It is not about whether you have been a people pleaser in the past. It is about who is holding the deed right now, tonight, at eleven, when the arm of the chair lights up.

You have one owner, and the four minutes were never in the agreement. Paul wrote that down at Galatians 1:10, and the Spirit is the reason it reads like a doorway instead of a rebuke.

Nobody Bid For You

Now the part that goes under everything else, and this is where I want you to slow down, because a man who has been spent for nine years will hear this as one more thing to get right.

He did not take you on because you answer fast.

That is the whole difference between the house you actually live in and the street you have been serving. Every one of those relationships, at some level, was underwritten by your reliability. Not because those people are bad, and I am not going to stand here and prosecute your sister. It is just how a service works. The value is in the answering, and you know it, and that is precisely why the phone gets picked up before the second buzz.

He made the claim first. Before there was any answering to be reliable about. He said whose you are while you were no use to Him whatsoever, and nothing you have delivered since is what secured it and nothing you drop tomorrow is what forfeits it. There was no bidding. There was no comparison against a more responsive man. He said it out of Himself, and that is the only kind of belonging that does not have to be maintained.

Which means the thing you have been terrified of losing was never the thing you actually have.

This is yours tonight, and not one of the nine years of answering is what secured it. That is settled at Galatians 1:10, and the Spirit has been pressing it on you every time the screen lights across the arm of that chair.