Sunday Somewhere In Wyoming

Half past eight on a Sunday morning and the light is coming in low and flat across a lot full of rigs, and it makes even a truck stop look like something.

Coffee that has been on the burner a while. A man two booths down telling a waitress about his granddaughter with more detail than she asked for and she is letting him. A dog in the cab of a Peterbilt watching the door like the door owes him money.

And a driver in a corner booth with a plate he has mostly finished, checking the clock on his phone, because at home right now they are about eleven minutes into the singing.

Eleven years he has done this. He can tell you the good stops on four different routes. He can tell you which dispatcher will actually call you back. He is a believer, has been since he was twenty-six, reads in the sleeper most nights, prays out loud in the cab because who is going to hear him.

And he has quietly concluded something about himself over those eleven years, and he has never said it to a pastor or a wife or anybody, and it is this: whatever it is that makes a man a member of a church, he has probably forfeited it, because he is never in the room, and the room is where all of that happens.

What this page is not going to do

Let me say it flat out first, so you can read the rest without your guard up.

Nothing here is going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you close enough that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the bottom you can go down until something fits. There is no questionnaire coming, and there is no friendlier version of one waiting either.

That is not me being careful with you. It is that the chapter men reach for when they ask what am I for does not answer that question, and neither does the one I want to put in front of you.

You are not disqualified by a schedule, and you did not forfeit anything by being four states away on a Sunday. That is not encouragement I am handing you. That is what the word says about how a man got where he is, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to be in a particular building before He would deal with him.

The ordaining happened upstream

Here is the verse I want on the table, and it is not in Corinthians.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

Before ordained. That is the whole freight of the sentence and it is easy to run past at highway speed.

Before. Ahead of time. Upstream. Laid out and decided before you got there.

And notice what it says the works are for: that we should walk in them. Walk. Not attend. Not occupy a seat while they happen around you. Walk in them, which is a word about motion and about a road.

You are His workmanship, and the good works you walk in were laid down ahead of you rather than handed out at a sign-up table. I am not making that stretch. Paul writes before ordained in Ephesians 2:10, and the same Spirit who moved him to write it is the one who walks a man down a road at four in the morning with nobody else in the cab.

Which means the eleven years are not eleven years of absence from something. They are eleven years of walking in something.

The foot's mistake, at seventy miles an hour

Now go back to Corinthians, because Paul saw this coming and he wrote the objection down himself.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?1 Corinthians 12:15

Hear what the foot is claiming. It is not saying I do nothing. Feet cover ground constantly. It is saying I am not the other one, so I must not really be in.

That is exactly the sum a driver runs on a Sunday morning. Not I do nothing for God. He prays more hours a week than most men who never miss a service. It is I am not the one in the room, therefore I am not really a member.

Paul answers it flat. Is it therefore not of the body. No. The conclusion does not follow and it never has.

You have been reasoning from your absence to your standing, and the word puts that exact reasoning down in ink specifically to overturn it. He had it written out loud so a man could hear his own voice in it, and the Spirit who breathed that line is not riding shotgun agreeing with the math.

Set, and where He set you

Then the line everybody knows, and it says more than people take from it.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

Set the members in the body. Not set the members in the building. The body is people who belong to Christ, spread across every county and shift pattern and time zone there is, and the seating chart on a given Sunday is a fact about a room, not a fact about a body.

Every one of them. Individually. Including the ones whose work is on a road.

As it hath pleased Him. Which is a decision, made on purpose, by somebody who wanted it this way.

You were set in this body by God Himself, and the setting was not conditional on your being reachable at ten on a Sunday morning. That is what the sentence says in the plainest words the language had, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it hold weight in a man at a formica table.

Now hear the other half, because a man could take this the wrong way. This is not a permission slip to quit gathering. Gathering is good and you should get in a room whenever the road lets you, and you already know that. What this is, is the end of a private verdict you have been carrying that the word never handed down.