Nobody Has Ever Asked Me To Do Anything

Fourteen years in that building and he can tell you honestly that nobody has ever asked him to do one thing.

Not a rotation. Not a team. Not a one-off. Not the thing where somebody says we should get you involved and then does not. Not even the small stuff, the carry this, the stand there, the could you keep an eye on the door.

He does not think anybody has excluded him. That is not what this is and he would be embarrassed to have it read that way. They are busy and he is quiet and he arrives about four minutes before it starts, which he now understands is probably a factor.

He is fifty-nine.

He gives. He is there almost every week. He knows about sixty people by name and about nine of them properly.

And underneath fourteen years there is a thing he has never said to anybody, which is not really about jobs at all.

It is that being asked is how a person finds out. That is the mechanism, as far as he can tell. Somebody looks at you, decides you are one of them, and asks you for something, and that is the moment you learn where you stand.

He has never had that moment. And after fourteen years, the absence of it has stopped feeling like an oversight and started feeling like information.

What is not on this page

Let me say it plainly at the start, out of respect.

Nothing here is going to ask you to volunteer for anything. There is no invitation at the bottom of this page, no suggestion that you put your name down, no gentle nudge toward getting involved. That would be a page telling you that being asked is the answer, which is exactly the thing that has been hurting you.

And nothing here is going to tell you what you are for. No list, no exercise, nothing to find yourself on.

And nothing here is going to give you a role, a next step, or anything to do at all beyond one small thing with your hands.

You are not going to be handed a job, and nothing here is going to make usefulness the proof of anything. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a verse that settles the question before the subject of work ever comes up, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to be asked before He would deal with him.

The word is household

Here is the sentence, and the word at the end of it is the whole thing.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Household.

Not staff. Not workforce. Not team. Household, which is a word about who lives in a house.

And look at what it is being contrasted with: strangers and foreigners. Those are words about standing, not about function. A stranger is not somebody who does not contribute. A stranger is somebody who does not belong there, whatever they do.

Paul is not saying you have been promoted from unhelpful to helpful. He is saying the category has changed. You were outside, and now you are of the house.

You are of the household of God, which is a statement about where you live rather than about what you have been asked to do. I am not stretching that. Ephesians 2:19 uses the language of citizenship and household rather than of service, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man arriving four minutes before it starts.

Nobody in a household gets asked in

Now the thing that follows, and it is the part that undoes fourteen years.

Think about how a household actually works.

A child in a house is not asked to be there. There is no moment where somebody looks at them, decides, and issues an invitation. They are in the house because of who they are, and the jobs, if there are any, come later and are a completely separate matter and do not establish anything.

Nobody's belonging in a house was ever created by being asked to do something in it.

Which means the mechanism you identified fourteen years ago is not the mechanism. Being asked is a thing that happens in a household. It is not how anybody got in.

You have not been waiting outside a door, and the asking you were watching for was never the thing that would have put you in. The word says household and it says it before it says anything at all about work, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that building beside you for fourteen years and has not been waiting for somebody to notice you.

And it was settled before you arrived

Read the verse before it, because the timing matters.

The whole passage is about people who were far off being made nigh by the blood of Christ. Made nigh. Past tense. Done.

The change of category happened at the cross and was applied to you when you came to Him, and it did not require the agreement of anybody in that building, and it cannot be withheld by anybody in that building either.

Which is worth sitting with, because it cuts both ways and the second way is the freeing one. If nobody's asking could have established your place, then nobody's not asking can unsettle it.

You were made nigh and it was finished before you ever walked into that building, and there is no committee anywhere that has jurisdiction over it. That is Ephesians 2:13 in its own tense, and the Spirit who bears witness is not standing in that room waiting to see whether somebody asks you this year.