Do You All Like This Place

Six of them, nine years, and the same place every February.

It started properly. That is worth saying, because it always does. Nine years ago somebody suggested it, and everybody thought it sounded good, and it was good, and the following year it seemed obvious to do it again.

And then it became the thing they do.

The same place. The same week. The same restaurant on the Thursday, which is Fiona's favorite, and the same walk on the Saturday, which is Fiona's walk, and the same arrangement about who drives, which was set up because of a situation Fiona had in the second year that has not applied since about the fifth.

Nobody decided any of this. That is the entire point of the story. There was never a vote, there was never a takeover, and Fiona has never in her life said the words we are doing it this way. She is generous, she books everything, she does the spreadsheet, and if she stopped organizing it the trip would not happen at all and all six of them know that.

It is simply that her preferences have been the defaults for so long that nobody can now remember them being preferences.

Ceri noticed it in year seven and said nothing.

She noticed it in the specific way you notice these things, which is not as a grievance but as a small strange thought that arrives at an odd moment: she was reading the confirmation email and realized she does not like that restaurant, has never liked it, and has eaten there eight times.

Eight times. And she could not point to a single occasion where anybody had asked her.

She did not raise it. She would not know how to raise it without it sounding like a complaint about a woman who does everything for everybody, and she genuinely could not bear that.

Then this February, Priya came.

Priya is somebody's new partner, she had never been before, and she is not being difficult when she asks things, she is just a person who asks things.

They were sitting down on the Thursday, at the restaurant, and she looked at the menu and then round the table and said, entirely brightly:

"Do you all like this place?"

And there was a pause.

Not a bad pause. About two seconds. And then three people said yes at slightly different times, and Fiona said something funny about the puddings, and it moved on.

Ceri thought about those two seconds for the rest of the week.

Now let me ask you where yours is.

It might be a friendship group, a family, a team, a house. Somewhere your own preference has not been said out loud in years, and you could not now point to the moment it stopped being asked for, and if you tried to raise it you would sound like a person complaining about somebody kind.

Look at how the first one was decided

There is a moment in Acts where the earliest church has its hardest disagreement, and the interesting thing is not the ruling. It is the sentence describing who made it.

Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them to send to Antioch.Acts 15:22

The apostles and the elders. Two groups already, and both plural.

With the whole church. And there it is. In the room where the most consequential decision of the first century was taken, with actual apostles present, the sentence Luke writes includes everybody in the building.

He did not have to write it that way. The decision would have been just as binding without that clause. He wrote it because it was true, and because it mattered enough to record that the room was consulted.

So hear this said over you, at a table on a Thursday in February. Your preference belongs in the room, and nine years of it not being asked for is not evidence that it does not count. That is written into the way the earliest church actually did business, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named a few verses later as being part of that decision, which tells you what kind of arrangement He is comfortable working inside.

Now let me be careful, because this article could very easily make somebody act on a Thursday in a way they would regret.

Nothing here tells you to raise it with Fiona.

Not this year, not on the drive, not in a message afterward. I do not know that friendship, I do not know what nine years of somebody doing every spreadsheet is worth, and this page has no business spending it. If you eat at that restaurant another eight times without saying a word, you have not failed anything in this article.

And nothing here says Fiona has done a single thing wrong. Read that twice. She did not take anything. She was the one willing to organize, and the arrangement settled around the person who was willing, which is how it settles almost every time, and it is a description of a generous woman rather than a controlling one.

What this is for is smaller and it is only about you.

You have a preference and it is allowed to exist.

That is the whole message. Not that it must be acted on. Not that anybody owes you the Thursday. That the thing in you which has quietly concluded what I want is not part of this is wrong, and it has been wrong for seven years, and it has been costing you something small every February.

You are somebody with a view, and having one is not the same as making trouble, and the earliest church wrote the whole room into the record on purpose. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between a genuine complaint and an ordinary preference, and He does that in His own way rather than at the speed of a woman reading a confirmation email.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose founders were obsessed with getting ordinary members into the room where things were settled. Not because they thought leaders were bad. Because they had noticed how quietly a room can stop asking, without any one person ever deciding to stop asking, and they wanted a structure that would keep asking even when everybody had got comfortable.

Priya did in two seconds what those structures were built to do on a schedule.