According to That She Hath

Chair by the window, blanket over the knees because the afternoon has gone cold, phone on the arm of the chair face up.

There is a thing happening at church this weekend and she has seen the messages.

Four of them are moving furniture. Two are doing a shop for a family. Somebody has taken three days off work. There is a photograph of six people in a hall with a stack of chairs and everybody looks pleased and knackered and she zoomed in on it, which she is aware is a strange thing to do.

She has been ill for nine years.

Not all the time and not visibly and that is its own problem. Some weeks she is fine. Most weeks she has about three good hours in a day and no way of knowing in advance which three, and she cannot commit to anything with a time on it, which rules out roughly everything.

So what she does is this. She rings people. She knows what everybody in that church is going through, in detail, because she has the one thing almost nobody else has, which is time in the middle of a Tuesday, and she uses it.

She could tell you which four people are struggling right now and why, and two of those four have told nobody else.

And she does not count it.

That is the thing. She has a whole internal category called what other people do, and it has furniture in it and three days off work and a photograph of six people in a hall, and she has another category with nothing in it at all, which is what I do.

If you can offer attention and not much else, you know that chair. And you know the arithmetic you have been running for years: what I have does not count, because if it counted, somebody would have counted it.

The word, and then what a gift is measured against

Let me sit on the arm of the other chair and say the plain thing.

The problem is not the condition. You have made your peace with the condition, mostly, and you have a competence about it that nobody who has not got one would understand.

The problem is a category system you built years ago in which the things you can do are not in any category at all, and you have been living inside it so long that you zoom in on photographs of people stacking chairs.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean being able to carry something. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It is on you in that chair with a blanket over your knees on a Tuesday afternoon.

Now the verse, and I want you to read the second half of it slowly.

For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.2 Corinthians 8:12

According to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.

Paul says it twice, positively and then negatively, in one sentence, which is what a man does when he wants to leave no room at all.

The measure is what a person has. Not what they wish they had. Not what somebody else has. Not what would have been possible in a different body.

And the first condition is a willing mind, which you have and have had for nine years, and which is the only thing in that verse that is actually being asked for.

You are measured by what you have rather than by what you have not, and Paul says it twice in one verse so nobody can get around it. Second Corinthians 8:12 puts the accepting on the hath rather than the hath not, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in what is actually in a person's hands rather than in what a healthier version of them could carry.

What is actually in your hands on a Tuesday

Now the inventory, because you have never once done an honest one.

Here is what is in that chair with you.

Time in the middle of a Tuesday, which is the rarest commodity in that entire church and which every one of those six people stacking chairs would tell you they do not have.

Attention. Not general kindness. Attention, which is the ability to stay on the phone past the point where the other person has said the polite version and started saying the actual one, and which takes about forty minutes and which almost nobody can afford.

Nine years of knowing what it is like to have a body that does not do what it is told, which is why two of those four people have told you and nobody else.

A phone, on the arm of a chair, face up.

You have an inventory you have never counted and every item on it is a thing other people are short of. Second Corinthians 8:12 measures by what a person has rather than by what the room has, and it is the Holy Spirit who distributes differently to different people rather than issuing the same thing to everybody.

And here is the thing about the furniture, since you were zooming in.

Moving furniture on a Saturday takes four people and three hours and it is genuinely good and somebody has to do it.

Being the person a woman rings on the fourth bad Tuesday in a row, when she has already used up everybody who does Saturdays, takes nine years of a life and cannot be done by four people in three hours by any arrangement whatsoever.

You are supplying something that a hall full of people could not produce between them on a Saturday. Scripture never once ranks the gifts by visibility, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives severally as He chooses, which is a phrase about difference rather than about scale.

About the counting, and what I will not say

Now the counting, plainly.

Nobody in that church is going to count it. I want to say that rather than leave you to find it out again. There will not be a moment where somebody stands up and mentions the phone calls, because phone calls do not photograph and because most of the people you ring will never tell anybody they were rung.

So if you are waiting to be counted, you will wait, and I am not going to encourage you to.

And nothing comes back to you for it. No return, no health, no offset, nothing generated by anything. This site does not sell that.

What I will say is that the verse counts it, and it counted it before anybody thought about a photograph, and the counting in that verse is done by God and is described as accepted, which is a stronger word than most people notice.

You have something already accepted rather than something waiting to be assessed. Second Corinthians 8:12 uses the word accepted about what a person actually has, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your spirit rather than a hall doing it.

And ring one of the four this week. Not all four, because you have three hours and you do not know which three. One.