Five Words To One Person

Nine people in a circle of mismatched chairs, a Thursday, the radiator ticking.

The leader says the thing he says most weeks. Do not overthink it. If God gives you something, share it. You will know what to say when the moment comes.

And in the chair by the window a woman is nodding along, because she has been nodding along to that sentence for twenty two years.

She has never once known.

Not once. Not in twenty two years. She has waited for the thing everybody else seems to get, the sudden clear knowing, the sentence arriving fully formed like a telegram, and it has never come, and by now she has drawn the obvious conclusion about herself and stopped expecting anything else. She takes the notes. She makes the tea. She is the one who remembers whose mother is in hospital. She has decided, quietly and without any drama, that she is one of the ones who was skipped.

Here is what she does have, though she has never counted it as anything.

She knows that the young man three chairs along has been sitting slightly turned away from the circle for about five weeks. She knows he stopped bringing his Bible in and started leaving it in the car. She knows that when the leader prays for the group he says amen a beat late, as if he has to catch up to it. She noticed all of that without trying, the way you notice a picture hanging crooked.

And every week for five weeks she has thought: somebody ought to say something to him.

And every week she has thought: but I have not had a word.

She is going to go home tonight, put the kettle on, and think about him again while she waits for it to boil. That has happened five times now. It will be six by eleven o'clock.

There is something she has never been told, and it has been sitting in plain sight in the middle of the chapter that everybody quotes at her.

The fence Paul built, and how much room is inside it

When Paul writes to a church that had gone completely wild over the spectacular gifts, he does not do what we would do. He does not rank them and hand out grades. He does something far more interesting: he tells them what prophecy is actually for, in one line, and the line is a fence.

The one who prophesies speaks to people for their building up and encouragement and comfort.1 Corinthians 14, verse 3

Read the three words. Building up. Encouragement. Comfort.

That is the whole job description. It is not a partial list and Paul is not being coy. Those three words are the fence, and everything the gift is for lives inside them.

Now notice what is not in there.

Not one of those three words is about the future. Not one of them is about telling somebody what is going to happen to them, or what is wrong with their body, or what year the thing arrives, or who they should marry, or what the illness is called. None of it. That is not modesty on Paul's part. It is the fence, and the fence is there because a fence is what keeps something safe enough to be used by ordinary people in an ordinary room.

So here is the sentence that ought to land in the middle of your chest.

If you have ever seen somebody clearly and said one true kind thing to them that put strength back into them, you have been inside that fence the whole time.

And you have been inside the fence for twenty two years rather than outside it. The written word gives three words and no fourth, building up and encouragement and comfort, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who carries that to a woman who decided a long time ago that she was skipped.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, and the Spirit is the one who distributes rather than a sentence a leader says most weeks.

You did not miss it. You have been doing it in the kitchen after the meeting, in a text message on a Tuesday, at the end of a phone call, without ever once thinking it counted, because somebody along the way taught you that the real thing is a prediction and everything else is just being nice.

It is not just being nice. Being nice does not know that a man has been leaving his Bible in the car for five weeks. Being nice does not notice a beat of delay on an amen. Noticing is not a personality trait. Noticing is the first half of the gift, and you have had it running quietly for twenty two years.

The second half is the mouth, and that is the half that is stuck.

And what is stuck is a mouth rather than a gift you were never given. The word says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a description of a woman who has been full of something for five weeks and silent about it.

And nothing about you is under review for twenty two years of nodding along. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to the one who takes the notes and makes the tea and remembers whose mother is in hospital.