Version Four, No Author

Kemi found it on a Tuesday and could not stop thinking about it.

She had been looking for something else entirely, the way you always are. And there it was on the shared drive: the document that governs a genuinely significant part of how eleven people do their work, and which everybody follows, and which she has followed since her first week.

She opened the properties, because she is that sort of person and because she was procrastinating.

Created by: a name she did not recognize.

Modified: three years and four months ago.

Version four.

She asked around, lightly, over the next fortnight, in the way you can ask things without making them a thing. Nobody knew who the name belonged to. Two people thought it might be somebody who had been on a project team. One person said, with total confidence and no evidence, that it came from head office.

And Yemi, who has been there fourteen years and is the person everybody actually asks, said the sentence that Kemi has been carrying since.

She said, "It has been version four since I got here. Nobody wrote it. It just is."

She did not say it bitterly. She said it the way you would say it about weather.

And Kemi went back to her desk and did her job and followed the document, and something in her would not settle, and by about the third week she had arrived where people always arrive.

She started wondering what was wrong with her.

Whether she was being difficult. Whether this was the sort of thing a person notices when they have not been somewhere long enough. Whether she had, as somebody once said about her at a previous job in a way that was probably meant kindly, a tendency to question things.

Three years and four months. Eleven people. And no living human being who could tell you why.

Now let me ask you whose name is on yours.

Because there is a rule you follow. In a workplace, a family, a group, a house. Everybody follows it, and it has real consequences, and if you asked who decided it you would get four different answers and none of them would be a person you could actually go and ask.

Somebody has to be answerable

Paul leaves a colleague behind on an island with one job, and he states it in a single sentence.

For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you.Titus 1:5

Set in order what remains. Something was unfinished, and the unfinished thing was not doctrine and it was not a building. It was structure.

Appoint elders in every city. Plural elders, named people, in each place, with a route by which anybody in that place would know who they were.

Paul thought that mattered enough to leave a man behind for. Not to write a policy. To make sure there were people whose names were attached to it.

So hear this said over you, at your desk on a Tuesday afternoon. Your unease about a rule with nobody behind it is a structural instinct that the New Testament shares, and three weeks of wondering what is wrong with you has been three weeks of prosecuting yourself for agreeing with Titus. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts a person of what is actually wrong with them, and a general unease that never once names a fault is not how He works.

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly the article that could cost somebody at work.

Nothing here tells you to raise it.

Not with your manager, not on the drive, not in an email asking who owns the document. I do not know your workplace, I do not know how new you are or what it would cost, and this page has no business spending your standing. If you follow that document for another three years without a word, you have not failed anything in this article.

And nothing here says anybody did something wrong. The person whose name is in those properties may well have written a good document in good faith and then left. This is how it happens: somebody does a job, then moves on, and the thing they made keeps running with nobody attached to it, and every year it becomes slightly more difficult to ask about because everybody assumes somebody else knows.

There is rarely a villain. There is usually just a gap that nobody could see from inside.

What this is for is one thing.

You are not difficult for wanting a name on it.

That is all, and it is worth three weeks of your peace back. Wanting to know who is answerable is not a character defect, it is not newness, and it is not a tendency to question things. It is the thing Paul left a man on an island to sort out.

And here is what has been happening in you that is worth naming plainly. You took an accurate observation about a document, and within three weeks you had converted it into a question about your own character. That conversion happens fast in some people and it happens because somebody once said something, probably meant kindly, that you have carried ever since.

You are able to notice a gap in a structure without that being pride, and the Word says God is not a God of confusion but of order, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates real conviction from an old habit of suspecting yourself first, and He does it in His own way rather than at the pace of a woman at a desk on a Tuesday.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that spent a great deal of its energy on precisely this. Not on doctrine, which they had settled, but on making sure that every rule had people attached to it, that those people were known by name in their own place, and that there was a route by which an ordinary member could ask. They wrote it all down in enormous, unglamorous detail, and their reason was not suspicion.

It was that a thing nobody is answerable for tends, over three or four years, to stop being anybody's and start being simply how it is. And Yemi said that out loud in a staff room without knowing she was describing the entire problem.