I Wanted To Be The One Out Front

Thursday evening, and there are thirty people around tables in that hall doing a training night, and two of them are at the front acting something out badly to the general delight of the room.

He wrote the handout.

Eleven pages. It took him about fourteen hours over three weeks, and it is genuinely good, and the man running the evening said so at the start in a way that was warm and slightly too brief and entirely sincere.

He is at a table near the back with a cup of coffee he does not want, watching thirty people work through something he built.

Twenty-two years ago he was in a university lecture hall listening to somebody talk about going out and telling people, and he decided that night, with his whole chest, that this was what he would do with his life.

And then he tried it. Repeatedly, across two decades, in about nine different formats, and every single time the same thing happens, which is that something in him closes like a door and he cannot get a sentence out that means anything.

Not shyness. He teaches a class of forty adults twice a year without a flicker. It is specifically that transaction, with a stranger, about that subject, and something in him will not do it.

So he reads. And he writes handouts and study notes and outlines and a small book once that eleven people bought, and other people use the material, and the material works.

And he is forty-four, and there is a version of this that everybody around him would call faithfulness and a version he calls, privately, at a table at the back, being the man who could not.

Where this does not go

Let me say it plainly first, because you will read this closely and I would rather you were not braced.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is no compensating word at the bottom, no list, no paragraph revealing your real thing and expecting you to feel better about the table at the back. That would be a page telling a man what he is, and this site does not do that.

And it is not going to tell you that writing the handout is secretly the greater work. That is a compliment substituted for an answer and you would dismantle it before the end of the paragraph.

And it is not going to tell you that the door will open. Nobody knows.

You are not being managed through a failure, and there is no trade being offered here. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a run of rhetorical questions, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man reconciled to a substitute before He would speak to him.

Paul asks a run of questions and expects no

Here is the passage, and the grammar of it is the whole point.

Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?1 Corinthians 12:29-30

Seven questions in a row, and in the Greek every one of them is framed to expect the answer no.

Paul is not being cruel and he is not narrowing anybody. He has just spent a chapter arguing that the body is made of parts that are not each other, and this is the sharp end of it: no, not everybody is an apostle, and it is not a tragedy, it is what a body is.

Now notice what he does not do. He does not follow those questions with reassurance. He does not say but you all have something just as good. He says covet earnestly the best gifts, and then he goes into chapter thirteen, and the answer to the whole chapter turns out to be love, which is available to everybody without any of these questions being answered yes.

You are living inside the answer no to a question Paul asked expecting no, and that answer was never framed by Scripture as bad news about a person. I am not stretching that. The grammar of 1 Corinthians 12:29 expects the negative, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man at a table at the back of a hall.

The freezing is not a moral event

Now the thing you have never said out loud, examined.

You have been calling it being the man who could not. Which is a moral description. It implies a failure of will, or of love, or of nerve, and it has been sitting in you as a verdict for twenty-two years.

Watch what actually happens, though. You teach forty adults without a flicker. You have written eleven pages that thirty people are working through tonight. Whatever the door is, it is specific and it is narrow and it is not a general failure of courage or of love for people.

I cannot tell you what it is. That is not something a page can do about a stranger and anybody who offers is guessing.

I can tell you that a specific, repeated, narrow inability is a fact about a person and not a charge against them, and you have been prosecuting it as a charge for two decades.

You have not been failing at love for twenty-two years, and Scripture nowhere treats a limitation as a moral event. The word records limitations plainly in Moses, in Jeremiah, in Paul himself, without a charge attached, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that table at the back and is not conducting the prosecution.

Handing it over, exactly

Here is the action, and I want to be precise.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it.

It is not deciding the door will never open.

It is not deciding that writing is your gift and being content. Nobody here is telling you what you are.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own words, and putting it into His hands rather than prosecuting yourself for another twenty-two years.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture never requires a man to revise his self-assessment before he can hand something over. The word asks its questions and moves on to love without a word of consolation attached, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to feel resolved first.