Everybody I Started With

There were six of them and Warren is the only one still in that room.

They started together, near enough. Same few years, same age, same stage, and for about a decade they were in and out of each other's houses constantly and did everything together.

One of them leads something now that has a name people recognize. One writes, and does it well, and Warren has both of the books. One went abroad and has done something with his life that is by any measure significant. One is a professor of a subject Warren cannot explain properly.

One died at forty-four.

And Warren has been in the same town, in the same building, doing more or less the same thing, for twenty-four years.

He has looked hard at whether this is envy, because he is honest with himself and it is the obvious diagnosis.

It is not. He can read the books and be glad. When the man who leads the thing gets mentioned somewhere, Warren feels a straightforward pleasure and he has tested that carefully.

It is something else and it is worse, and it sounds like this:

Did I miss it?

Not: I wish I had what they have. More like a man checking whether there was a turning he should have taken, sometime around thirty-four, and whether the last two decades have been a life or a failure to move.

The one who leads the thing came back to speak in the spring. Warm about it. Genuinely glad to be there, no performance in him at all.

And afterward, in the car park, standing between two cars in the dark, he asked Warren something.

He said, "There was a woman who used to do the tea. Older. She prayed with me once, when I was about twenty-two, and honestly it changed the direction of my life, and I have been trying to remember her name for twenty years."

And Warren said the name straight away.

And then he said where she is buried, and what she used to say when she handed you the cup, and that she had a son who was not well, which almost nobody knew.

And the man stood in that car park and did not say anything for a bit.

And then he said, "There is nobody else alive who could have told me that."

Now let me ask you how many of yours are still here.

Because if this is you, you can count them on one hand, and you know exactly where everybody went, and you have run the question about the turning more than once.

He is not unjust

The writer of Hebrews is speaking to people who are tired and have been at it a long time, and he says something with a strange double negative in it.

For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, having ministered and still ministering to the saints.Hebrews 6:10

God is not unjust so as to forget.

He could have written God remembers. He does not. He puts it in the negative, and the effect is to answer an accusation nobody has quite made out loud, which is exactly the accusation running quietly under twenty-four years.

Forgetting would be an injustice. That is what the sentence says. Not a shame, not an oversight: an injustice, and therefore impossible for Him.

And then look at the tense at the end. Having ministered and still ministering. Past and present, both. He is not commending a season they completed. He is describing people who are still in the middle of it and have been for years, and he says God has the whole of it in view.

Nothing in the verse is about scale. There is no threshold in it, no size, no measure of visibility. Work, and love shown toward His name, and the saints who received it.

So hear this said over you, standing between two cars in the dark. Everything you have done in twenty-four years is held by a God who counts forgetting it as an injustice, and the question about a turning you missed was never a question He was asking. That is written in a letter to people who had been at it too long to feel it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a believer to will and to do, and He has been at work in that building through you since before most of the people in it arrived.

Now let me be careful about the other five, because I will not have this article become a quiet swipe at them.

They did not do the wrong thing.

The man who went abroad was right to go. The one who leads the thing is not a lesser Christian for being visible, and the fact that people know his name is not a strike against him, and he came back and stood in a car park and asked a humble question in the dark.

This category is not about staying being holier. If it were, half the New Testament would be an indictment of Paul, who never stayed anywhere.

And I am not going to tell you that your twenty-four years were secretly bigger than theirs. That is the same measuring stick turned round, and it is just as useless, and you would not believe it anyway.

Here is what I am actually saying.

You are carrying something that cannot be carried any other way.

A place has a memory and the memory lives in people, and when the people go it goes with them. You are the only one alive who knew that woman's name, and where she is buried, and what she said, and about her son.

That is not a consolation prize for not moving. It is a real thing that only exists because somebody stayed for twenty-four years, and it cannot be produced any other way, at any speed, by anybody gifted.

And here is the part that will help you at three in the morning: the question did I miss it assumes there was a single correct turning and that God was watching to see whether you would spot it. That is not how the Bible describes Him working with anybody. He works in the will and in the doing, and the tradition this site comes from has said for four hundred years that He is the one who orders a life, which means the last two decades were not you failing to notice a sign.

The word says He is not unjust so as to forget your work and your love, and it says it to people still in the middle of it. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure, which puts the staying on His side of the page.