They Know Your Gift And Not Your Tuesday

Eleven years and she can tell you what they will say when she walks in.

"Here she is." Or: "We were just talking about you." Or, from the ones who mean it most warmly: "What would we do without you."

They love her. She is not being cynical about this, and neither am I. They are good people and they mean every word.

They also know exactly three things about her: she can sing, she can run a room, and she will say yes.

She is forty six. She has been on the worship team since she was thirty five. She has led the women's breakfast, run two funerals when the pastor was away, sat with a family through a night in a hospital corridor, and driven forty minutes each way every Thursday for six years to a rehearsal that nobody would notice if she skipped.

Nobody in that building knows that she has not slept properly since January.

Nobody knows about her brother. Nobody knows what her doctor said in April. Nobody knows that on the third Sunday of last month she sat in the toilet cubicle for eleven minutes before soundcheck with her hands over her face, and then went out and led a room of four hundred people in worship, and it was not fake, and it cost her something she cannot name.

Here is the sentence she has never said. "They know what I can do. They do not know me."

And here is the thing underneath it, which is worse and quieter: she thinks that is the deal. She thinks it is what you sign up for when you are the one who can do things.

Somebody came out to the woods for David

David is in the wilderness of Ziph, hiding, hunted, at the lowest point of a long stretch of being the anointed one and the wanted one at the same time.

And a sentence goes by in the middle of it that most people read straight past.

And Jonathan Saul's son arose, and went to David into the wood, and strengthened his hand in God.1 Samuel 23:16

Take that where you are, eleven years in. You are findable and you always were. The word says Jonathan went to David into the wood and strengthened his hand in God, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that sentence in Scripture for people who only ever ask.

Went to David into the wood. Nobody sent for Jonathan. David did not put out a request. He was in the woods, doing what people in the woods do, which is surviving and not asking, and his friend got up and went and found him and put strength back into his hand.

That is the whole verse and it is the whole answer.

So take this where you are standing, and know it is not my kindness, it is what is written: you are allowed to be found. His word says Jonathan went into the wood and strengthened his hand in God, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that in Scripture so that somebody exactly like you, eleven years into carrying a room, does not conclude that being found is for other people.

And look at what Jonathan did not do. He did not fix the situation. Saul was still hunting. Nothing about the circumstance changed. He strengthened his hand, which is what one person does for another when they cannot change anything at all.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who had a night in a small meeting where his heart was strangely warmed, and then built a movement, and the piece of it that actually carried the load was not the preaching or the crowds.

It was six or seven people in a room, once a week.

They called it a class meeting. There was no teaching in it and no expert at the front. A handful of people sat down and were asked out loud how it really was with them, and they answered, and the others heard it. That was the engine.

And this is the part for you: the leaders sat in those rooms as members. The man who built it was asked the question like everybody else, because he could see plainly what happens to a person who only ever asks. They become the least known human being in the building, and they call it service, and it hollows them out over about a decade.

The nickname started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was true.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hinge between them was a small room where a leader was also a person.

I am not sending you to a program. Hear that. No sign up sheet, no new night, no curriculum. His word says confess your faults one to another and pray one for another, and it is His Spirit who does the work, and one person is where this begins.