Nothing On The Board With My Name On It

Marcus gets there fifteen minutes early on purpose, because the parking lot fills up when the midweek clubs let out and he would rather wait inside than sit in the truck with the engine running.

So he is standing in the hallway between the fellowship hall and the back doors, and the only thing to look at in that hallway is the board.

It is corkboard, three feet by four, and somebody has run a strip of blue ribbon down the middle of it for reasons nobody remembers. There is a pen on a string. The string is long enough to reach the bottom sheet, which somebody thought about, and Marcus has always liked whoever that was.

He reads it the way he reads it every Wednesday, top to bottom, both columns.

Worship team, spring auditions, must read music. Sound booth help wanted, experience on a digital board preferred. Grief care team, applications open to anyone who has completed the two weekend trainings. English tutors for the Thursday class, teaching background helpful. Newsletter, seeking a writer. Men's retreat in April, still looking for a speaker. Youth mentors, must clear a background check and commit to nine months.

Then a strip of paper at the bottom about a lost blue thermos.

He works at the tire shop out on Route 9. He has done it for nineteen years. He can hear a bad wheel bearing from across the bay and he can get a mounted tire balanced in four minutes flat, and there is no line on that board where either of those goes.

He reads it twice. There are old thumbtack holes all over that board in a pattern he could probably draw from memory by now.

The pen is right there on its string, and he does not take it off the hook, and that is not really a decision he makes. It is more that the taking down of the pen belongs to a different kind of person, and he has known that for a long time.

Then the doors bang open and forty kids come out at once and the hallway is a river, and his daughter Nell arrives at his knee talking about a game with a beanbag in it, and they go out to the truck.

Halfway home, at the light by the feed store, she asks him what he was looking at.

"The board," he says.

"What board?"

He puts the blinker on. "There's nothing on it with my name on it, kiddo."

She thinks about that for a second with her chin on the seatbelt, and then she tells him the beanbag game had four teams and hers came second, and by the time they turn onto their road the whole thing is gone out of the car like it was never in it.

The chapter Paul had to argue for

The line I want to put beside that hallway does not come from a book about encouragement. It comes out of an argument.

The church at Corinth had started ranking each other. Some abilities got you noticed in that room and some did not, and everybody knew which was which, and the people at the bottom of the list had begun to conclude the obvious thing about themselves. Paul spends most of a chapter dismantling it, and he does it with a picture so plain it is almost rude: a foot saying, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.

Then he says this.

On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.1 Corinthians 12:22

Sit on the two halves of that. Seem to be. That is Paul naming the ranking out loud and refusing it. And then indispensable, which is not a soft word, and is not a compliment, and does not mean valued or appreciated or important in its own way. It means the body cannot do without it.

You are a part of the body, and that was true of you before there was anything on a board with your name on it. 1 Corinthians 12:22 is where that sits, in writing, in an argument Paul was willing to spend a whole chapter on, and the Spirit does not argue a man into a sentence like that. He seats it.

And look at how a person gets into a body in the first place, because Paul says that too, a few lines earlier. God arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.

Arranged. Past tense. Somebody else's hand.

You were placed in the body by God's own arranging, and no sheet of paper on a corkboard is the instrument that did it. That is written in 1 Corinthians 12:18, in the tense of a thing already finished, and the Spirit is what carries a finished sentence across two thousand years and sets it down in a hallway at seven on a Wednesday evening.

A board is not a list of the body

Here is the mismatch that has been quietly wearing on you.

A board lists tasks. A task needs a competence, so every line on it has a competence in it, and it should. Nobody wants an untrained person on a grief care team, and nobody wants the sound running through a board that has never been touched before. Those lines are honest and they are doing their job.

But a board is a list of the church's open tasks. It has never once been a list of the church's people, and it was never built to be. You have been reading a maintenance schedule as though it were a census, and finding your name absent from it, and drawing a conclusion from that absence about who you are.

You are necessary in the flat sense of the word, and it has nothing at all to do with what would fit in a box on a form. Scripture chose a word there that means the body cannot manage without it, and the word said that first; what the Spirit adds tonight is that the sentence is about you, standing in your work boots in a corridor.

I want to be plain about something, because there is a comforting move here that I refuse to make.

I am not going to tell you that you have a hidden gift the board has no line for, or that you are secretly the remarkable one and everybody has failed to notice. That would just be the same ranking with you quietly moved to the top of it, and by Friday you would be back at the bottom, because a ranking always finds its bottom again.

Ordinary was the material from the start. Not ordinary with a surprise inside. Ordinary.

A knee cannot read music. A liver has never cleared a background check. There is no audition anywhere in a body, and there is no probation, and nothing in there is on a nine month commitment. The parts do not qualify. They are placed, and then they are simply in.

You have a place in that body already, and it was given to you rather than applied for. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God placed the parts as He wanted them, which is written down and settled, and His Spirit is not standing over the hallway waiting for you to earn a line. He is agreeing with the arrangement that is already in force.