The Thing You Wrote Down and Showed to Nobody

It arrived in the handshake, which is where it usually arrives, and Iain nearly dropped his plate.

The new man's name was Phil and he had come with somebody's brother-in-law, and he was doing what men do at those breakfasts, which is stand slightly too near the door with his coat still on. Iain went over because that is Iain, and he put his hand out and said the usual, and while Phil was saying something ordinary back, two words landed in the middle of Iain's head with no run-up at all.

The shed.

That was it. Two words and a weight underneath them like a hand pressing down, and a kind of sorrow that was very plainly not Iain's own sorrow, because Iain was having a perfectly good morning and had been thinking about bacon.

He has had this before. Not often. Perhaps a dozen times in nine years, and about half of those he could not make any sense of afterwards and the other half he never found out about at all.

But this is the part he has never told anybody, and it is the reason I am writing to you.

In the half second after those two words landed, before he had thought anything at all, something moved in his chest that was not about Phil.

It was a lift. A small, bright, entirely honest lift. I have got something.

And he was already turning to see who was standing near enough to hear him say it.

He caught it. He is not proud of how close it was. He stood there with his hand still in Phil's hand and his mouth already loaded, and he heard himself, the way you sometimes hear yourself, and he thought: whose is this.

So he said, good to have you, mate, sit with us, and he took his plate to the far table and he did not say the two words to anybody.

Later, in the car, he wrote the shed on the back of a folded sheet from the notice table, and he sat there and prayed for a man he had known for eleven minutes, out loud, about a shed, feeling faintly ridiculous, for about four minutes.

Then he put the paper in the door pocket and drove home and made no announcement to anyone, and to this day he does not know if it meant a single thing.

And you know exactly why I am telling you this, because you have your own version of it, and yours might be a name, or a month, or a picture of a blue front door, or a knowing about somebody in your row that arrived from nowhere and sat down.

And you also know the lift. That is the honest part nobody says out loud. The lift is not the gift. It arrives at the same moment as the gift and it feels almost the same, and telling them apart is most of the job.

It was never handed to you as evidence

I want to take one thing off you straight away, because it may be sitting on you and it does not belong there. Getting something is not a claim that you are further along than the person beside you. There is no ladder here. The Bible's own list of these things is not a ranking and it never was, and anybody who reads it as a league table has read it upside down.

And if you are sitting there thinking nothing has ever arrived in my head about anybody, hear this plainly: that is not a verdict on you either. The Spirit is not rationed by merit and He was never withheld from you.

But if things do arrive, then this message is for you, because there is one question that decides whether a gift stays a gift.

Not is it real. Not am I right. Those are the two questions everybody asks and neither of them is the one.

The question is who is it for.

To each one the Spirit gives something to make visible, and it is given for the common good.1 Corinthians 12:7

Read that last phrase again, because it is the whole architecture in four words. For the common good. Not for the credibility of the person carrying it. Not as evidence in an argument. Not as a way of being the man in the room who knew.

A thing given for somebody else's good, used to establish that I was right, has not been misused slightly. It has been turned round to face the other way.

And what you were given was aimed at somebody else from the start. The written word says it is given for the common good in the same breath that it names the giving, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has felt the lift and known it was not the gift.

And He shows you things and you hold them carefully. The word puts the manifestation in the Spirit and the purpose in the profit of everybody, and the Spirit is the one who distributes rather than ranking a room by who knew.

And here is the practical shape of it, which nobody teaches and which is the most useful sentence in this whole message.

The moment a thing goes public, the cost of being wrong lands on somebody else.

If Iain had said the shed out loud in front of nine men, and it meant nothing, Phil would have carried that. He would have stood there with his coat on being looked at, in a room where he knew one person, working out what expression to have. And if it had meant something, and something enormous, Phil would have had it opened in public by a stranger before breakfast.

Either way it costs Phil.

And what you are given is for helping somebody, not for proving you were right. The word never once offers this as evidence in anybody's favor, and the Spirit is the one who keeps it pointed outward rather than back at the carrier.

Written on a folded sheet in a car and prayed over for four minutes, it costs nobody anything at all. If it was nothing, no harm was done anywhere. If it was something, it has been prayed about by a man who wanted nothing out of it.

That is not timidity. That is what carefulness looks like when it is holding something that belongs to somebody else.

And nothing about you is under review for the things you have not said. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who has written things down and shown them to nobody for years.