You Have Never Started A Message

Three years and two months. Four hundred and something messages from you, and every single one of them is a reply.

You are good in that chat. That is the thing. You are actually one of the best people in it. When Tam's dad went into hospital you were the second person to say something and the first person to say something useful. You remember birthdays. You put the laughing face on things that deserve a laughing face and you do not put it on things that do not.

And you have never begun one. Not once. Not a photo, not a question, not a here is a thing I saw, not a does anybody want to.

You have typed them. That is the part I actually want to talk about. You have typed dozens of them, over three years, and stood there with your thumb over the arrow, and read it back, and deleted it, and put the phone down.

Twice you have got as far as sending and then deleted it inside about eleven seconds, which they can see, which is worse, and neither time did anybody mention it.

You could not fully explain why if somebody asked. There is a feeling and the feeling is about eight words long and you have never said it out loud, and it is something like: I am in this group but I am not one of the ones who starts things.

That is not a thought about a phone. That is a thought about a room, and you have been carrying it into every room since you were about fourteen.

Paul saw exactly this and wrote it down

There is a passage where Paul does something unusual. He stops arguing and puts words into the mouth of a body part, and the sentence he gives it is one of the loneliest in the New Testament.

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

Read the structure of what the foot is doing. It is not being excluded. Nobody has thrown the foot out. Nobody has even said anything to the foot.

The foot has run a comparison, reached a verdict, and then delivered the verdict on itself.

And Paul's answer is not encouragement. He does not tell the foot it is doing well or that feet matter too. He asks a question with an obvious answer, which is the most bracing thing you can do to a person who has talked themselves out of a room: is it therefore not of the body?

No. Obviously not. The foot's opinion of its membership has no bearing whatsoever on its membership.

So take that now, before we go any further. You are of the body, fully, and it has nothing to do with whether you start messages. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who placed you into that body, and He did not put a probation period in it.

Nobody appointed the starters

Here is what I think you believe, and I say it gently because I have believed it too.

You believe there is a category of person in that group who begins things, and that the category is real, and that other people can see who is in it, and that you were sorted into the other one a while ago by a process nobody described to you. The written word has no such category in it anywhere, and the Holy Spirit set the members as it pleased Him and did not draw one.

There is no such category. I promise you there is not.

What there is, is three or four people who happen to have a slightly lower threshold for hitting send, and a whole group of people who read a message and feel warm and never think for one second about who wrote it first.

Nobody in that chat has ever once thought: interesting that she only replies.

But you have thought it four hundred times, and here is what it has cost. Every one of those deleted messages was a thing that did not reach people who would have loved it. The picture of the frost. The question about the Tuesday. The one about your grandmother's recipe. All of it, gone, into a delete key, out of a life that had it to give.

You are already fully seated in that circle. His word says the member that talks itself out is still of the body, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set the members in place, every one of them, as it pleased Him.

The plain hall and the thing that vanished

A man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 with one rule that people still repeat, which was that no seat in the place could be rented by anybody.

The reason that mattered is not the money. It is that a rented pew told everybody in the room, in advance and permanently, which households were the ones the church ran on. Nobody had to be told. You could see it from the door.

Bresee took the seeing away. All seats free. The people with nothing came in first, on purpose, and it was said out loud rather than left to be worked out.

And what disappeared with it was the sorting. Nobody in that hall had to establish which category they were in, because the room had stopped publishing categories.

Your group chat has never published one. You have been reading a seating plan that does not exist, and living by it for three years, and the written word never wrote it and the Holy Spirit has never enforced it.