Nineteen Years And Eight People

The question was kind. That is what Nell keeps coming back to. Nobody was having a go at her.

A woman she had just met, at a thing, making conversation properly rather than politely, asked her what she did, and Nell explained, briefly, the way she does. And the woman, interested, asked the obvious follow-up.

So what has come of it?

And Nell said something. She could not tell you now what it was. She remembers the shape of it: a bit vague, slightly too long, and finished with a small self-deprecating thing that closed the subject and let them both move on.

She has thought about it since about nine times.

Because she could not answer, and it is not that there is no answer. It is that everything true she could have said sounds like nothing when it is said out loud to a stranger.

Nineteen years. Eight people, roughly, though the eight are not the same eight; four of the original are still there, and four have been replaced by other people, and one of the replacements has been there eleven years.

What has come of it? A marriage that did not end in 2011, which nobody outside that room knows about and which is not hers to describe. A man who was drinking and is not, and who would not want it mentioned. A woman who can now say a particular sentence about her father out loud, which took nine years, and which sounds like nothing at all to anybody who was not there for the nine years.

None of that goes into a sentence at a party.

You have your own version. Somebody asked you a fair question and you could not answer it, and you have replayed the moment since, and the replaying has been quietly doing something to you.

Nobody here is going to give you a better answer for next time. This is not a message about how to describe your work.

But it is worth knowing why the question has no available answer, because the reason is not that there is nothing there.

Paul gives the charge and there is no output in it

There is a moment where Paul says goodbye to a group of elders and hands them their whole job in one sentence.

Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.Acts 20:28

Read the whole charge and look for a target in it. There is not one.

There is no number. There is no growth expectation, no timescale, nothing about what the flock should look like by a given year. The verbs are take heed and feed, and both of them are about attention and provision rather than about production.

And notice who did the appointing. Over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers. Not a committee and not their own ambition. The Spirit put them there, and the sentence takes that as settled before it says anything about the work.

And your position was assigned rather than settled for. That is not my encouragement: the written word names the Holy Spirit as the one who made them overseers of that particular flock, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman replaying a conversation for the ninth time.

And nothing in your charge has ever included an output. The word gives feeding and heeding as the whole job, and the Spirit is the one who lets somebody stop measuring themselves against a target that was never issued to them.

Why the answer sounds like nothing

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth understanding because it will happen again at the next party.

Everything Nell could truthfully say has three features, and each one makes it unsayable.

It is somebody else's. The marriage is not hers to describe, the man who stopped drinking has a right to his own privacy, and a woman who tells a stranger those stories has broken the thing that made them possible.

It is slow. Nine years to be able to say one sentence about a father sounds, to somebody who was not there, like nothing having happened for nine years.

And it is invisible by design. The whole of it consists of things that did not happen: a marriage that did not end, a man who did not go back, a woman who did not stay silent. You cannot photograph an absence.

So the question what has come of it is asking for a kind of object that this work does not produce, and Nell stood there trying to hand over something that does not exist in that form and heard herself sound vague.

And you are not vague about your own life. The word says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and it puts remembering on the side of His justice, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real accounting rather than a comfort offered to somebody with nothing to show.

And what did not happen has been counted. The word says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and the Spirit is the one who applies that to nineteen years of things that never became visible.

Nobody is telling you to grow anything

I want that plain, because this is exactly where a message like this quietly suggests that a bigger version would answer the question better.

You are not being told to scale anything, plant anything, or make the eight into eighty. Nothing on this site will ever suggest that small is a stage on the way to something, because in Acts 20 it is not a stage, it is the assignment, and the Spirit is named as the one who made it.

And you are not being told to get better at explaining yourself either. The question at that party will be unanswerable next time as well, and that is a property of the work rather than a deficiency in you.

And you are not behind. The word puts faithfulness rather than scale at the center of what is required in a steward, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which is not a conclusion anybody at a party was ever in a position to draw.