He Did The Arranging Himself

Half past nine on a Saturday and there are about thirty of them in the parking lot by the woods, in coats, drinking something hot out of a flask somebody's mother sent.

Two crates of litter pickers and a mountain of green bags. A woman with a clipboard she is holding more for the look of the thing than for any information on it. A teenager who has come because his friend came and is already having a good morning. Somebody's terrier going along the line of legs like an inspection.

The jobs go out fast, because everybody knows what they do. The two men who always take the stream. The pair who do the top path because one of them can get over the stile and the other can talk. The one who stays at the parking lot with the bags, which everybody agrees is the important job and which nobody has ever thanked her for properly.

And there is a woman standing slightly to one side with a spare bag in her hand, waiting to be told, and the wait has gone on about forty seconds too long, and it has started to feel like the story of her whole life in miniature.

Nine years at that church. She turns up. She is glad about it. And if you sat her down and asked her what she is actually for, she could not tell you, and she has never said that out loud to a single person, because everyone else seems to know and it sounds like ingratitude when you say it in daylight.

What this page will not do

Before anything else, so that you can read the rest without bracing.

Nothing here is going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you closely enough that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the end that you can find yourself on. There is no questionnaire coming.

That is not caution. It is because the chapter everybody reaches for when a person asks what am I for does not do that either, and the fact that it does not is the single most freeing thing in it.

Paul is writing to a church that had turned its gifts into a league table, and he does not answer their question. He changes it.

You are about to be given something better than a label, and it is the thing a label was only ever standing in for. That is not my instinct, it is what the written chapter does with the question, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a person to be classified before He would use them.

The foot's problem was not the foot

Read what Paul actually puts in the mouth of the part that feels spare.

If the foot should say, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body (1 Corinthians 12:15). And the ear says the same thing about the eye a verse later.

Notice what the foot is not saying. It is not saying I have no function. Feet function beautifully. It is saying I am not the other one, therefore I am not really in.

That is the ache, precisely. It is not that you do nothing. It is that you have been measuring yourself against people whose part is more legible than yours, and concluding from the difference that you are somehow extra.

You are not extra, and the comparison you have been running is the one thing in this chapter Paul actually corrects. Scripture puts the false conclusion in writing so that a person can hear it out loud and see what it is, and the same Spirit who inspired that sentence is not standing over you agreeing with the foot.

Then comes the sentence, and it is one line long

But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.1 Corinthians 12:18

Sit in it for a second, because there are three things in it and every one of them is about you.

God arranged. Not the schedule. Not the person who was short of volunteers in September. Not the accident of who happened to be standing near the sign-up.

Each one of them. Individually. Not the useful ones, not the obvious ones. Each.

As he chose. That is a decision, made with intent, by somebody who wanted it exactly this way.

You were arranged into this body by God Himself, deliberately, and you are standing where He put you. That is what the verse says in the plainest words Paul had, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and makes it feel like it has your name in it. Placement is not what is left over after the gifts have been handed out. Placement is the thing God did first.

And Paul keeps going, and it gets better rather than gentler. On the contrary, he says, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable (1 Corinthians 12:22). Indispensable. Not tolerated, not included out of kindness, not made to feel welcome. Cannot be done without.

The question the chapter answers

Here is the quiet swap that happens when you read the chapter instead of a list.

The question what am I for has no answer that a page can give you, and chasing it has kept you at the edge of the parking lot with a spare bag for nine years. The question the chapter answers is different and it can be answered this morning: whose body am I in, and who put me where I am standing?

You already know the second one. You know where you are. It is probably so ordinary that it has never occurred to you to count it: the person you always end up talking to, the thing you always end up doing, the corner of the room you gravitate to, the job everybody assumes you will do and nobody has named. That is not the leftovers. According to that verse, that is an arrangement.

You have a place, it was decided, and the deciding was done by God rather than by circumstance. The word is explicit that the arranging was His choice, and the Spirit distributes as He wills rather than as a hall full of people happen to organize themselves. Where you are is not an accident that God has agreed to work with.

None of this is a verdict on the people around you, and none of it makes you a judge of where anybody else has been put. That is not yours and it never becomes yours. This is about one person standing in a parking lot with a bag.