I Left Over Me

It is a Sunday morning three years ago and the rehearsal is running late, because the rehearsal is always running late.

She is on the platform with a music stand that will not stay up. The desk is being run by a boy called Tom who is seventeen and has been doing it for five weeks, and Tom has put her monitor mix somewhere unusable and then gone off to find a cable, and she can hear herself in one ear like a voice down a drainpipe, and they have eleven minutes.

She says his name across the room. He comes back. And then she says a sentence.

It is not a swear word. It is worse than that. It is a short, clever, contemptuous sentence about how long five weeks is and what a person might reasonably be expected to have learned in that time, and she delivers it in front of eleven people with a little bit of a laugh on the end so that it cannot quite be complained about.

Tom goes red from the collar up. He says sorry twice. He fixes it.

Twenty minutes later she stands in that same spot and leads two hundred people into the presence of God, and it goes well. It goes better than usual, if she is honest, and she has been honest about very little since.

Afterwards she finds him by the coffee and apologizes properly, and he says it is fine, honestly, it is fine, and he means it, because he is seventeen and generous. The worship pastor says something kind about pressure. Someone's wife hugs her in the car park and says we all have Sundays like that.

And every single one of those kindnesses lands on her like a tile off a roof.

Because she has seen the thing now. She has seen what is in her mouth when the mix is bad and there are eleven minutes left, and she has seen how smoothly the contempt and the anointing sat next to each other in the same hour, in the same woman, without either of them being embarrassed.

She sings the following Sunday. Then she has a week off. Then a cold. Then a thing at work. Then nothing.

Three years. She still drives that road, because it is the road. She tells people she stepped back for a season, and people nod, and it is the kind of sentence nobody investigates.

The true sentence, the one she has never said out loud to a living soul, is four words long.

Nobody did anything to her. She left over herself.

Paul prays too big and then says why he dares

There is a line at the end of Paul's first letter to Thessalonica that people quote on cards without noticing what it is standing next to.

He has just prayed the largest prayer in the letter. He asks God to sanctify them completely, spirit and soul and body, and to preserve them blameless all the way to the coming of Jesus. It is an outrageous thing to ask on behalf of a young, messy, frightened church, and Paul knows it, and he does not soften it. He simply puts one sentence after it, and the sentence is the reason he dared.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.1 Thessalonians 5:24

Read what that does. Paul asks for something no one in that room could produce, and then he names the person who is on the hook for it, and it is not the room. The One who called them is the One who does it. The calling and the carrying out have the same owner, and He is described by one word: faithful.

Take that as spoken over you and not merely at a church in Macedonia. You are inside a calling that you did not issue to yourself, and it is not being underwritten by your best hour or undone by your worst one. His word puts the doing on Him, and His Spirit is the One who has kept you awake to this for three years instead of letting you forget it, which is not the behavior of a God who has written somebody off.

The kindness that felt like a tile off a roof

Here is why every kind word in that car park hurt.

She was not looking for a verdict from them. She had already reached one. What she wanted was for somebody to be as appalled as she was, because that would have confirmed that she still had standards, and their gentleness took even that away.

That is what leaving over yourself is like. Nobody put you out. Nobody could, really. You walked out to spare a building from a person you had just met properly for the first time.

And I am going to say the plainest thing in this whole message now. What you saw that Sunday was true. That is what was in your mouth. The contempt was real and the boy's face went red and no amount of warm theology puts that back.

And it did not break anything between you and God, because there is nothing in your hands to break. Scripture says He does not deny Himself even when we are faithless, and His Spirit is not a nervous employer keeping a file. You have been treating a covenant like a job you resigned from, and it was never a job.

What is settled, and what is not

Let me be careful here, because this is the place where a message like this usually goes soft and stops being any use.

What is settled is God's faithfulness. It is settled the way a mountain is settled. It does not move because you moved and it did not thin out over three years of Sundays in a car.

What is not settled, and never was, is whether the way you speak to a seventeen-year-old matters. It matters. It mattered to him, it mattered to God, and the fact that you could not shrug it off is not your sickness, it is your health. A woman who could have done that and gone home whistling would be in far more trouble than you are.

So both things stand, warmly and at once. The boy mattered. The apology mattered. And none of it is the hinge the covenant swings on, because the covenant does not swing on anything of yours. Right now, as you read, you are held by the faithfulness of the One who called you, and that is the written promise of 1 Thessalonians 5:24, and the Spirit of God is the One who has been keeping you all the way through the season you thought you had walked out of.