They Called Her Name and Not Mine

The hall is full and there is bunting and somebody's grandchildren are running down the side aisle and nobody is stopping them, which is right.

Fortieth anniversary. There is a cake the size of a table.

And the pastor is doing the bit where he calls people up, and he calls Yvonne, and the room goes up, properly, the way a room goes up for somebody it loves.

And she is clapping. Her hands are moving and her face is doing exactly the right thing, and she is looking straight at Yvonne with a warm expression and she can feel that it is convincing because it is not a performance, she does love her.

They did that work together. Nine years of the Saturday club, and Yvonne did the front of it and she did the schedule and the safeguarding and the first aid renewals and the phone calls to the parents when something happened, and there were about eleven things that happened over nine years and she took all eleven of them.

Nobody has done anything wrong. Yvonne would say her name in a second if anybody asked. Yvonne has said it, more than once, and she has waved it off both times because waving it off is what you do.

It is the waving off that she is thinking about now, actually, with her hands still going.

Because she has waved it off for nine years, and this afternoon she found out what it cost, and she found it out in the middle of a room full of people she loves.

If you have clapped for something you did half of, you know that hall. And you know the loneliness of it, which is not resentment: I am the only person in this room who knows what is happening in me, and I put myself here.

The word, and then a body that shares

Let me stand in the row beside you and say the plain thing while the clapping covers it.

The problem is not Yvonne. You would defend her to anybody and you mean it and she has tried twice to put your name in it.

The problem is that you have waved it off for nine years and you did not know what waving it off was doing, and you found out this afternoon in the fourth row with your hands going, which is the worst possible place to find out anything.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean being called up. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking, and nothing that was said from that platform in the last four minutes reported on it in either direction.

Now the verse, and it is the one that describes what a body actually does.

And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.1 Corinthians 12:26

Read what that is claiming. It is not an instruction. It is a description of how a body works. If one part is honored, the whole thing rejoices, because a body does not have separate accounts.

Paul is arguing, in that whole chapter, against exactly the thing that is happening in your chest. He is saying: the foot cannot say because I am not the hand I am not of the body. The parts nobody sees are the ones he calls more necessary. And the honor, he says, God gives to the parts that lack it.

That is verse twenty four, and it is about you, and nobody reads it at anniversaries.

You are in a chapter where the unseen parts are called more necessary and the honor is said to be given by God to the part that lacked it. First Corinthians 12:24 says God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one Paul names as distributing through that entire chapter.

The waving off

Now the waving off, because that is the actual thing and it has been going on for nine years.

Twice Yvonne has said your name and twice you have waved it away. And I want to be careful here, because there are two completely different reasons a person does that and they look identical from the outside.

One is humility, and it is real, and it is a good thing, and it costs nothing because the person genuinely does not need it.

The other is a woman refusing to be seen because being seen is dangerous, because if you accept it once you find out how much you wanted it, and it is safer never to test that.

You know which one yours was. You found out this afternoon.

And here is the thing: the second one is not a sin. It is a self protection, and it worked for nine years, and it stopped working in the fourth row, and the stopping is not a failure, it is the arrival of information you would rather not have had at a party.

You have been protecting yourself rather than being humble, and finding that out is not a fall. Scripture makes the honoring of the unseen part God's own act rather than a thing a person must decline, and it is the Holy Spirit who shows a person the true shape of a habit at the moment it stops working.

And there is something worth doing about it, and it is not what you think.

It is not asking to be thanked. It is this: next time Yvonne says your name, do not wave it off. Say thank you. That is the whole thing, and it will be one of the harder things you do this year.

You are able to receive something rather than deflect it, and receiving has never once been the opposite of humility. The written word has God giving the honor to the part that lacked it, which means there is such a thing as honor rightly landing, and it is His Spirit who makes a person able to stand still while it does.

Eleven things over nine years

Now the eleven things, because they should be said out loud somewhere and this is the only place they are going to be.

Eleven times in nine years something happened at that club, and eleven times you made the call to a parent, and every one of those calls was the worst four minutes of somebody's week and you took all of them.

Nobody in that hall knows how many there were. Yvonne does not know the number. You know the number.

And a thing known only by the person who did it and by God is not a lesser thing. It is the exact category Jesus talks about when He says the Father who sees in secret, and He says it three times in one chapter about three different practices, and every time the point is the same: what is unseen is not unwitnessed.

You have eleven calls counted by somebody who was on both ends of every one of them. Matthew 6:4 says thy Father which seeth in secret, repeated three times in one chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches all things, which means the number is known even though nobody in that hall could tell you it.

And I am not going to tell you they will realize. They might not. Anniversaries are not audits and nobody is going back through nine years of schedules.

Both halves. Not being called up is not the withdrawal of God's favor and it is not a spiritual advantage you should be pleased about.

You are favored and your name was not said, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Scripture puts the honoring of the unseen part in God's hands rather than in a hall's, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to hold both while their hands are still moving.