Counting What I Cannot Do

Ray sits in the back pew at the ten o'clock service on Dunmore Street, second seat in from the aisle, and he has sat there for eleven years.

He keeps a list. He has never written it down, because writing it down would turn it into a thing, and it is not a thing. It is just accurate.

He cannot pray out loud. He can pray. He cannot do it with his eyes shut in front of people, because his voice goes somewhere strange around the third sentence and he can hear it happening while it happens. He cannot find Habakkuk without the contents page. He cannot sing in tune, and he knows it, and so does the man on his left. He cannot start a conversation with somebody he has not met. He cannot get emotional at the moments the room gets emotional, and he has stopped pretending to.

That is five. On a bad Sunday he can get to fourteen.

Marcia sits directly in front of him. Before the second song is finished, Marcia has done three of them. She has crossed the aisle and hugged the visitor and used her name, which she got right on the woman's second Sunday. She has lifted the baby off the young mother whose arms had gone shaky. And at the end of a verse she has turned around, put her hand on the shoulder of the man in the row behind, and said about eleven words to him about his scan, and the man's face came apart in a way that was clearly a relief to him.

Ray, in the same twenty minutes, has held the door. He has handed a folded paper to a woman who came in late and did not want to be looked at. And he has asked Colin, who sits at the end of his pew every single week, whether his mother got home from the hospital, and then listened to the whole answer, including the part about the parking and the man on the desk who was kind about it.

That is his morning.

At the light on Fourth and Dunmore on the way home, Ray does the count. He is not being dramatic about it. He is just going down the list the way you check a receipt, and he gets to fourteen before the light changes.

Here is the thing Ray does not know, and is not going to be told.

Colin has sat at the end of that pew for four years. Not for the acoustics. Not because the aisle seat is easier on his knee, though he has said that twice. He sits there because Ray asks him about his mother every week and has never once asked him anything he would have to perform an answer to, and because for a long stretch of those four years that was the only unhurried question anybody asked him.

Colin has never told anybody that. Certainly not Ray.

The light changes. Ray drives home.

Look at the verb He used

There is a sentence Paul wrote to a church that had been counting itself, and the whole weight of it sits on one word, used twice.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.1 Corinthians 1:27

Chosen. Not settled for. Not made do with. Not tolerated on a technicality until somebody better applied.

Chosen is a word for a decision made in advance by somebody who had the whole field in front of him and reached, on purpose, for a particular thing. It is what you do at a market with fruit in front of you. It is what a builder does walking a field. It is deliberate, and it happens before any results come in.

You are exactly the material He went looking for, and He was not making do with you. I know how that lands on a person who has just finished counting. 1 Corinthians 1:27 puts the verb chose in one sentence twice, and the written word does not repeat a verb by accident. What the Spirit adds is that the sentence is an address and not just a doctrine, and that it has your name on the envelope.

Now read the reason, which is the half people stop before. The choosing is done so that no flesh should glory in His presence. Nobody gets to take a bow. That is the point of the arrangement.

Which means the arrangement depends on the ordinariness staying ordinary. If God's method were to select the weak things and then quietly upgrade them into the impressive things, the whole design collapses on the first Sunday, because now there is somebody in the room to be impressed by again.

You have nothing on that list that disqualifies you, because the list was never the qualification. Scripture put that beyond argument in one line. The Spirit does not argue you into it either; He simply keeps saying it over the back pew, week after week, until a person stops flinching when it arrives.

The list is accurate, and it is not a verdict

Let me be plain with you, because I think you have been offered the other thing and it did not hold.

Your list is true. You genuinely cannot do those things. Nobody here is going to tell you that with practice and the right teaching and a bit more courage you would be able to, because that is flattery, and flattery has a shelf life of about four days, and you have already outlived several rounds of it.

So we leave the list standing. It is accurate. What we are going to do is take it out of the chair it has been sitting in, because it climbed into the judge's chair a long time ago and it was never issued a robe.

Look at how the list got written. Every item on it came from watching somebody else. Pray out loud, because Marcia does. Know where Habakkuk is, because the man on the end always does. Cry at the right moment, because the row in front does. It is not an inventory of you. It is an inventory of other people, transcribed in your handwriting.

And notice what a deficit list has no column for. There is no line on Ray's list that reads: asked Colin about his mother, fourth year running, never once made him perform an answer. There is no place to put that. The form does not have a box for it, so it does not get counted, so as far as Ray knows it did not happen.

You were chosen as you are, and the arrangement asks you to stay exactly that. The written word says God chose the weak things so that nobody standing in His presence could take a bow for it, and His Spirit is not running a quiet improvement plan on the side while pretending otherwise.

There is one more thing in that passage worth having. Paul goes on to the base things and the things which are despised, and the things which are not, and it is all one long unbroken sentence about a hand reaching deliberately into the bottom of the field.

You are the finished person that hand reached for, and it reached without hesitating. That is written down, in order, in the plain past tense. The Spirit is what turns a deliberate hand in a letter to Corinth into a hand you can feel on your own shoulder in a back pew.