I Am The One Who Lands It

Rosalind gives every evening a shape and she has begun to notice she is making some of the shapes up.

She is the one who closes things. Not by title. It has simply been true for about fifteen years that when a room has been through something, whatever it was, and there is that stretch where nobody knows how it ended or what it was, she says the two or three sentences that let everybody go home.

She is very good at it. She can take a formless forty minutes and hand it back to a hundred people as a thing that happened and meant something. People have told her, kindly, that it is the most useful thing she does.

She is fifty-two.

And in the last year or so she has started listening to herself doing it.

Because a certain number of those two-or-three-sentence landings are not from anywhere. They are constructed, fast, out of what she saw in the room and what she knows about the people in it and a lifetime of understanding how a thing ought to conclude.

She is not inventing content. She has never once put words in God's mouth and she would rather stop entirely than do that.

What she is doing is smaller and harder to see. She is supplying an ending. She takes something that genuinely had no ending yet and she gives it one, warmly and truthfully and out of her own head, and a hundred people take that ending home and it becomes what happened.

And the reason she does it is not vanity. It is that a room which goes home unresolved feels, to her, like something she let happen.

You may know that stretch.

Maybe you are the one who lands it too. Maybe you are good at it. And maybe you have started hearing yourself do it.

The only test in the verse

There is a verse that describes an ordinary gathering with everything going on at once, and it ends with one test, and the test is not the one you have been applying.

How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying.1 Corinthians 14:26

Let all things be done unto edifying.

That is the whole standard. One word. Edifying, which is a building word, and it means something got constructed in somebody that was not there before.

Now hold it against the test you have actually been using for fifteen years, which is did the room leave with an ending.

Those are not the same. They overlap often, and that is why you have never had to notice, but they come apart precisely at the moment you have been covering: an evening with no resolution can build people, and a tidy ending supplied by somebody's good sense can build nobody at all.

And notice what the verse is not worried about. It lists five things happening in one room, apparently at once, and Paul's response to the disorder is not to demand that every item be closed. It is to ask what got built.

Which means unresolved is not a failure state. It is simply a state, and the verse has no objection to it, and the only question it asks is one you have never once asked at the front of a hall.

And the test is what got built rather than what got closed. The written word ends the whole list with one standard and the standard is edifying, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who has been landing planes for fifteen years.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word keeps both halves in His hands, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the second rather than requiring somebody at the front to produce it before the chairs go back.

What you have actually been protecting them from

Now the mechanism, because you have been calling this service and it is service, and there is one thing underneath it that has never been named.

A room in an unresolved stretch is uncomfortable, and the discomfort is not evenly distributed. Some of it belongs to the hundred people. And a great deal of it belongs to you, standing at the front, watching them not know what to do.

What you have been ending, fifteen years running, is partly their discomfort and partly yours, and they arrive at the same moment and feel identical from where you are standing.

And there is a cost you have not been able to see because it is invisible by design. Every time a room is handed a supplied ending, it learns that endings come from the front. A hundred people have been taught, gently, over fifteen years, that they do not have to sit in anything, because somebody will resolve it before the tea.

That is not a small thing to have taught them, and you never decided to teach it, and it came out of love every single time.

And what you have been ending is your own discomfort too. The word says let us not be weary in well doing, which assumes the well doing is tiring, and the Spirit is the one who lets a woman notice her own cost without turning it into a charge.

And nothing about you is under review for fifteen years of landing things. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has never once put words in God's mouth.

And nobody is asking you to leave them stranded

Let me be plain, because you will hear this as an instruction to go silent at the front and that would be worse than anything you have done.

Nothing here says stop speaking. The pastoral work of closing a room is real, most of what you have said in fifteen years was true and needed, and a hall of people who have been through something should not simply be dismissed into the car park.

And nothing here settles what any gathering should or should not do. That is argued about by people who love those rooms, and this page has no ruling.

What is on offer is one different sentence for the nights when you have nothing: I do not know what that was, and we are going to leave it with God, and we are going to have the tea.

That is not abandoning them. It is the honest version of the same care.

And you are permitted to end a night without an ending. The word makes edifying the only standard and never once requires resolution, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a lower grade of the work you do.