A Recording I Have Never Played To Anyone

The recording is nineteen seconds long and it is very good.

Farid made it in the last week of June, on a warm evening, parked at the end of his street with the engine running and the phone held down by the wheel arch. He did three takes. The third one is the one he kept.

You can hear it clearly. There is a rhythmic thing underneath, and then a harder sound about eleven seconds in, twice, and then it settles. He listened back and thought, with real satisfaction, good, that got it.

That was eleven weeks ago.

Since then the file has been in his phone under a name he made up. He has played it back to himself, alone, in the car, more times than he would like to say. He can tell you what happens at each second of it.

He has never played it to one other human being.

Now think about how strange that is, and I say this with a great deal of affection, because I have done the same thing in a different area of my life.

He solved the hard part. The hard part was capturing an intermittent noise, which anybody who has tried it will tell you is genuinely difficult. It never happens when you want it to. He got it, in nineteen seconds, cleanly, on the third take, on a warm evening in June.

And then he stopped, one step short of the entire point.

The recording exists to be played to somebody. That is its only function. A recording nobody hears is not a recording, it is a small private ritual, and it has become one: a man in a parked car listening to a noise he already knows about.

His cousin, who fixes things and would have listened to it in twenty seconds, sat in that car with him in August. They drove forty minutes. The phone was in the cupholder the whole time.

And when he got out his cousin said, "Anything you need doing on this?"

And Farid said, "No, it's alright."

And the phone was right there.

The hard part is already done

Let me set down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess what that noise is. I have not heard the recording, I am not qualified, and a man at a distance offering a diagnosis is doing harm dressed up as help. And if that car ever does anything under your hands that worries you, this message stands aside and it goes to somebody qualified this week.

What I want to talk about is the last step, and why it is heavier than the nineteen seconds.

Because recording it was a technical problem, and playing it to somebody is a different kind of problem entirely. The first one needed patience and a phone. The second one needs a man to say, out loud, in front of another man: I have a thing I do not understand and I would like help with it.

You are not diminished by needing another man in the room, and Scripture puts two together as the ordinary arrangement rather than the fallback. Ecclesiastes 4 says two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor, which makes company a design and not a concession, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of a recording nobody has heard yet.

Those are not the same size, and pretending they are would be dishonest.

Now let me put down the verse, because Paul says something about this that people quote constantly and almost never in the direction it points.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2

Everyone reads that as an instruction to the strong. Go and carry somebody's load. Be the helper.

But a burden being borne needs two ends. And if everybody in a room is obeying the first half of that verse and nobody is willing to be the one whose burden gets borne, then the verse cannot be obeyed by anybody.

Which means letting a cousin hear a recording is not the opposite of that command. It is the other half of it. It is how somebody else gets to fulfill the law of Christ, and a man who will not hand over his end is quietly preventing that.

You are not a burden when you hand somebody the other end, and Scripture makes the carrying a two person act rather than a charitable one. It is written to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, which requires a burden and therefore requires somebody willing to have one, and His Spirit is the one who makes that reading true rather than convenient.

You have already done the difficult half of this, and the passage puts the completing of it in another person's hands on purpose. Galatians 6 has the fulfilling happen between two people rather than inside one, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a nineteen second file into an act of obedience.

What the recording became

Here is the thing I want to name, gently, because I recognize it.

Somewhere between June and September, that file changed jobs.

It started as a step toward getting the car looked at. And then, without anybody deciding, it became a substitute for it.

Because listening to it feels like progress. It has all the shape of progress. It involves the problem. It involves effort. It produces a small feeling of having addressed something. And it costs nothing at all, which is exactly why it can be repeated forty times without ever moving an inch.

That is not laziness. That is a man who genuinely wants to deal with this, discharging the wanting into the only act available that does not require him to ask anybody for anything.

You were never someone who avoids a thing, and eleven weeks of a phone in a cupholder is a man wanting to act rather than a man refusing to. Galatians 6 goes on to say that every man shall bear his own burden, which sits beside the sharing rather than against it and describes a person who takes his own responsibility seriously, and the Spirit of God is what holds those two verses together without either one accusing anybody.

And I will say the plain half, because a man deserves it said.

The recording is worth something only in somebody else's ears. Every week it sits unplayed, it is worth exactly nothing, however good it is, and it is very good.

You have a thing in your hand that another man can use, and the written word treats that kind of handover as ordinary rather than as a favor. It is written that we being many are one body in Christ and every one members one of another, which is Romans 12 describing a normal arrangement between people, and His Spirit is what makes a phone held out an entirely unremarkable act.