I Cannot Stand That Long

Nine minutes. She timed it once, out of a kind of spite, on her phone, in her own kitchen.

Three rows back is where she sits now, on the end, because the end means she can get up without a production if she has to.

The woman doing it at the front is good. That has to be said and it is true and it does not help. She is twenty-six and warm and slightly nervous, and she does a thing with her left hand that everybody has started doing, and last week she brought the whole room in on a line that has been sung badly in that building for a decade.

Eleven years. That was hers. Not in a possessive way, or not only, but in the way a thing is yours when you have carried it through two building projects, a split, and the year nobody had any money.

She can still sing. Her voice is completely fine. That is what makes this a peculiar kind of grief that nobody around her quite understands: nothing has happened to the gift, only to the standing.

The sentence in the third row is not I miss the front. It is: if I cannot do the thing I was given to do, then either the gift was taken back or it was never really a calling.

You know that third row. It might be singing, or preaching, or building, or working with children. You still have the thing. You cannot do the thing. And the gap between those two facts has begun to look like a message about whether God gave it to you in the first place.

Without repentance

There is a short sentence in Romans, sitting inside a very long argument about whether God changes His mind about people, and it is one of the sturdiest things in the whole letter.

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.Romans 11:29

Without repentance is old English for irrevocable. It means God does not change His mind about them, does not recall them, does not take them back when circumstances change. Paul is not making a small pastoral point. He is arguing about an entire nation and whether God's word toward them can fail, and the answer he gives is that the gifts and the calling are not the sort of thing God withdraws.

Now hold that against the third row. Your body changed. The gift did not. The calling did not. Those are separate items and only one of them has been affected.

You are holding a calling that God does not recall, and He has never once revoked it on the basis of what a body can do. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman on the end of a row, and the Holy Spirit who gave the gift in the first place is the evidence that nothing has been taken back.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic in that seat. If the gifts are irrevocable, then nine minutes is information about a condition with a name that a doctor can discuss with you. It is not the length of your calling, and it never had the standing to become that.

Nobody here will promise you the minutes back

Here is the second thing, and it is the reason the first can be trusted.

Nothing on this page will tell you that your standing improves. Nobody knows. Nothing here will say God is going to restore what has been taken, or name a season, or suggest that if this is a calling then the body must follow, because that sentence has been said to a great many people in third rows and it left them carrying a promise nobody had authority to make.

What is here does not need the minutes. The calling is intact at nine minutes. It was intact at eleven years and it is intact now, and the woman at the front is not standing in anything of yours.

You have been carried through every Sunday in that third row, and the carrying was never measured against how long you can be upright. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in that room rather than assessing seating positions.

And nothing here is asking you to find a new way to serve. That is what people say, usually within four sentences of hearing about a limitation, and it is well meant and it lands as an instruction to fill the hole quickly so that nobody has to look at it.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a plastic chair. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not sat with, three rows back, for a year. And the thing in the way is not the woman at the front, who is good and who did nothing. It is a sentence: either the gift was taken back or it was never a calling. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority sitting on the end of a row. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how long you can be on your feet.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than grief, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.