The Thing You Signed Up For And Dropped

They said two hours a week.

That is what was on the sheet and that is what the woman said on the phone and neither of them was lying. Two hours a week was the shape of the thing on paper.

By the third week you had a phone number in your phone that rang at ten at night. By the fifth week there were two of them. In week six you spent an entire Saturday on something that no version of two hours a week has ever contained, and you did it gladly and you were not resentful.

In week seven you sat in your car outside your own house and could not go in, and something in you said, very clearly and without any drama: I cannot do this.

So you stopped.

You told them you had a lot on. That is technically true and it is not what happened.

Three years.

And in three years you have not gone near anything. Not a rota, not a list, not the thing at the school, not the collection at Christmas. When somebody asks, you say you are not really able to at the moment, and you have been saying that for three years, and everybody has stopped asking.

Here is what you decided in that car, and you have never said it out loud to a single person.

That you are not the sort of person who can actually do this. That other people can and you cannot. That the seven weeks proved it.

The measure in Matthew is astonishingly small

There is a scene where the King separates two groups of people, and everybody remembers the separation and almost nobody notices the size of the actions being described.

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

One. Of the least. Of these.

Read the list of things He names in the verses before it. Fed. Gave a drink. Took in. Clothed. Visited. There is not a project among them. Not one of those is a role, a rota or a commitment. Every one of them is a single act of a single person toward a single other person on a particular day.

And the King's own accounting is: you did it to Me.

So take this now, three years on. You are not measured by a scheme you could not sustain. The written word counts by the person and by the act, not by the weekly commitment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that accounting, and He recorded every one of those seven weeks.

Nothing in that passage is capable of being dropped. You cannot fail at a cup of water. There is no seventh week.

What actually happened in week seven

Now let me say what I think happened, because you have carried the wrong explanation for three years and it has cost you a great deal, and neither the written word nor the Holy Spirit has ever agreed with it.

You did not discover that you cannot do this. You discovered that the thing you were doing had no edge on it.

Two hours a week with a phone number that rings at ten at night is not two hours a week. It is unbounded, and a person cannot sustain an unbounded thing, and the fact that you lasted seven weeks says something quite impressive about you rather than something damning.

The failure was in the shape of the arrangement. It was not in your capacity and it was certainly not in your heart, because a person with a small heart does not spend a Saturday and it does not cost them anything to leave.

And here is why that mattered so much afterwards. Because you took an unbounded arrangement as your test case, and when it collapsed you generalized from it to everything, including things that have edges, including things that take ten minutes and finish.

You are not disqualified. The written word measures by the single act toward the single person, and the Holy Spirit has never once assessed anybody on a rota.

What the hall in Los Angeles actually asked of people

There was a hall near the middle of Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the work it became known for was rescue work in the streets immediately around it.

The thing about that work, when you read what it consisted of, is that it was almost entirely made of finished actions.

A meal, which ends. A bed for a night, which ends in the morning. Somebody walked home, and then you are home and it is over. Sitting with somebody until a doctor came, and then the doctor came. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

There were people in that building doing enormous ongoing things, of course there were. But the ordinary member of that hall did finished things, with edges, and went home, and came back.

That is not a lesser version of the work. It is the version that lasts thirty years instead of seven weeks.

The written word counts one act toward one person and calls it done unto Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the edges in.