I Serve In Three Places And Still

Three teams. She could list them but it does not matter what they are.

One is a Sunday thing. One is a Wednesday thing that runs about eight months of the year. And one is the sort of thing that has no meeting and no schedule and just means her phone goes at inconvenient times, which is the one she would keep if she could only keep one.

She is twenty-nine. She has been at that church since she was twenty-four.

She is good at all three. Reliable, which is the actual currency. She has never once let anybody down, and the people who run those teams would each, independently, tell you she is the person they would keep.

And she is standing in a hall between services, with people setting up at one end and clearing away at the other, and she has just noticed something that she has been circling for about a year and finally caught.

She joined the third team because of the feeling.

Not consciously. She would have said, at the time, that she said yes because they needed somebody. But the honest version, which she has now looked at directly, is that she was hoping that being on three would do what being on two had not, and that a settled feeling would arrive somewhere around the six month mark.

It did not. And she is now clear that a fourth would not either, and that this is not a problem that responds to more.

Where this does not go

Straight out, because you are quick and you can see the shape of most things by the second paragraph.

Nothing here is going to suggest you take on anything or step back from anything. This page cannot see your teams or your church and has no business steering that, and it is not going to.

And nothing here is going to tell you what you are for.

And nothing here is going to ask you for anything at all beyond one small thing with your hands.

You are not going to be given a fourth thing or told to drop one, and nothing here makes serving the proof of your place. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one sentence about which direction the choosing went, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman on three teams before He would deal with her.

Ye have not chosen me

Here is the sentence, and it is a correction of a direction.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.John 15:16

Ye have not chosen me.

He says the negative first, which is unusual, and He says it to men who had in fact left everything and followed Him and who would have said, entirely honestly, that they had chosen Him.

They did leave everything. That was real. He is not denying that they walked away from boats.

He is telling them that the walking away from boats was not what established the relationship, and that the causation runs the other way, and that they have been standing in something they did not initiate.

You have been trying to establish from your end a thing whose entire direction runs from His, and He said the negative half first because He knew people would get it backward. I am not stretching that. John 15:16 puts ye have not chosen me before I have chosen you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman in a hall between services.

Which is why three did not work

Now the mechanism, because you like mechanisms.

If your place were established by contribution, then three teams would settle it better than two, and four better than three, and there would be a curve.

There is no curve. You have been running the experiment for five years and the data is flat. Two did not feel different from one. Three did not feel different from two. And the reason is not that you have not found the right amount.

The reason is that the variable is not on your side of the equation. You have been increasing an input that does not feed into the output at all.

That is not a criticism of the serving. All three of those teams are better because you are on them and that is real and it is worth something.

It is just not doing what you hired it to do, and it was never able to.

You have been increasing an input that was never connected to the thing you were trying to move, and Scripture puts the whole of the choosing on the other side. That is John 15:16 in its own direction, and the Spirit who searches all things has been with you through all five years and all three teams and was not waiting for the third one.

And the fruit is downstream

One more thing, and it matters for the way your mind works.

Notice the order in that verse. I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit.

The choosing comes first. The going and the fruit are the purpose clause, which means they are downstream of a decision already made. They are what the choosing is for, not what produces it.

Which means the three teams are not evidence you are gathering. They are consequence. They are what happens on the far side of something that was settled before you were twenty-four.

You are producing consequence rather than gathering evidence, and the word puts the fruit in a purpose clause that hangs off a choosing that already happened. That is John 15:16 in its own grammar, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit is not adding your Wednesdays to a total.