I Was Put In The Other Category At Nineteen

Wendell got sorted on a Tuesday night in October when he was nineteen years old and he has stayed sorted for thirty-eight years.

A preacher he liked and still likes said, from the front, that there are two kinds of people in any church. There are the ones God calls to speak. And there are the ones God makes faithful, who set out the chairs and stack them after, and who hold the whole thing up, and without whom nothing happens.

It was a good sermon. It was meant kindly and it was aimed at people who felt overlooked, and Wendell went home that night genuinely comforted.

And he took his slot.

He has set out chairs on the Old Mill Road for thirty-eight years. He has driven people to hospitals. He has put a new roof on the fellowship hall twice. Nobody in that county has been more useful and everybody knows it.

He is fifty-seven now, and there is a thing he has noticed about his son-in-law.

It is not a prediction. It is not about the boy's marriage or his health or anything that is going to happen. It is a plain observation about who the young man already is, that Wendell can see clearly and that the young man plainly cannot see at all, and it would take about ninety seconds to say and it would land.

He has been carrying it eleven months.

And the reason he has not said it is not modesty and it is not doubt about whether it is true. It is that saying a thing like that is what the other category does, and he was sorted a long time ago, and a man does not get up out of his slot at fifty-seven.

You may know that slot.

Maybe somebody kind sorted you young. Maybe you have been useful ever since. And maybe there is something you are carrying that you have filed under not my job.

What Moses said when they tried to stop it

There is a scene in Numbers where two men are doing this in the camp who were not on the list, and somebody runs to have it shut down, and Moses answers with a sentence that has never stopped being awkward for anybody who likes categories.

And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!Numbers 11:29

Would God that all the LORD's people were prophets.

That is the man at the very top of the structure, the one with the most to lose from a wide distribution, saying he wishes there were no shortlist at all.

And look at what prompted it. Joshua, who loved him, wanted the two unauthorized men in the camp stopped, and his instinct was protective and orderly and completely wrong, and Moses corrected it on the spot.

Nobody in that scene is worried the two men are unqualified. The only person worried is the one who thought there was a category, and the answer he gets is that the man in charge would gladly give the whole camp the thing.

Which means the line you were sorted along that Tuesday night is not a line God has been maintaining, and the highest authority in the passage is on record wishing it away.

And you were sorted by a good man and not by God. The written word has Moses wishing the whole camp had this, in answer to somebody trying to protect his position, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who took his slot at nineteen and kept it.

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 sermon on the Old Mill Road in October.

Why the sorting worked so well

Now the thing that has kept it in place for thirty-eight years, because it was not stupidity and you should not think of it that way.

That sermon gave you something real. It gave a nineteen-year-old who felt like nothing a place to stand, and a name for what he was good at, and thirty-eight years of purpose that he actually delivered on. Half a county has been served out of that Tuesday night.

A thing that useful does not get re-examined. Nobody audits the foundation of a house that is still standing.

And the sermon was not even wrong about most of it. Some people do speak from the front and most people do not, and the chairs do genuinely have to be put out, and the man meant every word.

He simply drew it as a line between kinds of people, when the actual difference is between kinds of occasions, and a nineteen-year-old is not going to catch that distinction in the middle of being comforted.

And what you accepted was a comfort rather than a ceiling. The word says God is no respecter of persons, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a man who has never once thought that verse was about him.

And nothing about you is under review for thirty-eight faithful years. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has put a roof on that hall twice.

And nobody is moving you to the front

Let me be plain, because you have already imagined me asking you to stand up somewhere and the answer is no.

Nothing here puts you on a platform. Nothing here asks you to speak in a meeting, or to be introduced as anything, or to change one thing about the chairs, which you should keep putting out because that is love and it always was.

And nothing here hands you a future to hand anybody. Not what will happen to that young man, not his marriage, not his health, not a date, not an outcome, because that is not this and it never was and the whole fence exists to keep it out.

What is on offer is ninety seconds on a gate on a Tuesday, said to one person, about who he already is.

And you are permitted to say a plain true thing out of your own slot. The word has the highest man in the camp wishing the whole camp had it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a promotion.