The Sentence After His Good News

Stuart was genuinely glad, and about four seconds later something else arrived, and he has never told anybody what it was.

The gladness was real. He wants that first because it is true and because a message that treats it as a mask would be describing somebody else. His friend rang with good news, proper good news, the kind you wait years for, and Stuart was on his feet in his own kitchen making the noise you make and meaning every bit of it.

They talked for about twenty minutes. It was a good call.

And then he put the phone down on the counter and stood there, and into the quiet came a sentence, fully formed, in his own voice.

And I am still here.

That is all it said. It was not bitter. It did not have any heat on it at all, which is somehow worse, because heat would have made it an emotion he could disapprove of and this was not an emotion. It was a report.

He has been in the same place with the same handful of people for a long time. He does not want to say how long in a way that makes it sound like a complaint, because it is not one and he would not swap.

But he has watched people arrive, work alongside him, and move on to bigger things, and he has been glad for all of them, and every single time the sentence arrives about four seconds after the gladness, and it is always the same sentence.

You have your own version. Somebody told you their news, and you meant the congratulations, and then something came up in you afterwards that you have never once said to another living soul.

Nobody here is going to tell you that you were secretly envious. That would be lazy, and it would also be an insult to twenty minutes of genuine gladness.

But the sentence is worth looking at, because of what it assumes.

The mark of the good shepherd is that He does not leave

There is a sentence of Jesus about shepherds where the distinguishing feature is not skill and not results.

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.John 10:11

And then read on, because the next verses make the contrast explicit. The hireling, He says, is the one who sees the wolf coming and leaves, and he leaves because he is a hireling and does not care for the sheep.

So the difference between the two is not competence. It is not the size of the flock or how it is doing. It is what happens over time, and specifically what happens when leaving would be reasonable.

Giveth his life for the sheep is the extreme end of a spectrum whose ordinary end is simply: he is still there.

Which means the sentence that arrives in Stuart four seconds after the gladness, and I am still here, is a description of the one thing the passage uses to identify a good shepherd.

He has been hearing it as an indictment. It is a job description.

And staying is the work rather than the absence of it. That is not my reframing: the written word makes remaining the mark that separates the shepherd from the hireling, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man standing in his own kitchen with a phone on the counter.

And you are not behind. The word says he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and it puts faithfulness rather than scale at the center of that sentence, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are.

What the sentence assumes, and where it came from

Here is the part worth being precise about, because the sentence has a hidden clause in it.

And I am still here only stings if there is an assumed second half: and I should not be by now.

Nobody ever said that to Stuart. He has never been told he ought to have moved on, and if you asked the people around him they would be baffled by the idea. The second half is his own, and he picked it up somewhere without noticing, the way everybody picks up the water they swim in.

It came from a culture, mostly. From the fact that movement is legible and staying is not. When somebody plants something you can point at it. When somebody has been with the same eight people for a long time there is nothing to photograph, and so, over years, a person absorbs the idea that theirs is the thing that happens before the real thing starts.

That is the assumed clause, and it has never once been examined.

And nobody has been keeping you back. The word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, which puts the assigning in His hands, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man consider that he might be exactly where he was put rather than stuck.

And these people are not a waiting room. The word tells shepherds to feed the flock of God which is among you, and among you means the ones actually there, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real assignment rather than a holding pattern.

Nobody is telling you your friend was wrong to go

I want that said clearly, because a message like this can quietly make somebody feel better by making somebody else smaller.

Your friend's move was almost certainly right. His news is good news. The gladness you felt was not naive and it does not need revising.

There is no ranking here. Ephesians 4 lists the five and gives them all the same purpose, which is equipping everybody else, and a set of functions that becomes a league table has read the chapter backwards.

And nothing here is telling you to stay, either. I do not know your situation and this site does not issue instructions about anybody's placement.

What is on offer is only this: the second half of your sentence is not from Scripture, and it is worth knowing that.

And the accounting is His and not the culture's. The word says when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away, and it is said to elders about the ordinary feeding of a flock, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real horizon rather than a compensation.