The Spare Part in the Testimony Service

He has the urn on before the last chorus, because if you wait until the end there is a queue and the water is not ready, and he has known that since he was about nineteen.

Testimony night is twice a year and it is always the best-attended thing the church does. He puts the chairs out in the afternoon, eleven rows of eight and the two wheelchair spaces at the front, and he does the sound because the young lad who used to do the sound has gone to university.

And then he stands at the back with his arms folded and listens.

The man who came out of prison in March, who tells it well, and every time he tells it there is a bit more in it, and it is all true. The woman who slept in a car park for two winters and has been clean for six years now, and cannot say the word car park without her voice going. The couple who were three weeks from selling the house and splitting the children between them.

And they all land in the same place, all of them, and he could say it along with them: and if He did that for someone like me.

Everyone claps. He claps. He means it, absolutely, and he is not one of those men who resents a good story.

Then he goes and puts the tea out.

He was carried into that building at six weeks old. His mother is buried in the yard behind it. He has never taken a drink in his life, and it is not out of principle, it just never came up. He has never left, and he has never come back, and there has never once been a night when the whole thing seemed to him like something he might walk away from.

And in that room, twice a year, all of that is worth exactly nothing.

Nobody has ever been unkind to him about it. That is what makes it hard to say out loud. It is not the church's fault and it is nobody's fault. It is arithmetic. If the currency in the room is distance traveled, and he has stood in the same spot for fifty-eight years, then he has none, and everybody with an actual story has some.

The young lad from the youth group asked him last spring, quite innocently, while they were carrying tables, so what is your story.

And he heard himself say, oh, I have always just been here.

He heard how it came out. Like an apology. Like a man saying sorry for not having gone anywhere.

Later, folding the last four chairs on his own with the lights off in the far end of the hall, he found himself thinking a thing he has never said to another living person, which is that the people with the stories seem to have something with God that he simply does not have, and that after fifty-eight years he is more or less part of the furniture in a building where God shows up for other people.

You have been in that hall. Perhaps not that one. But you know the arithmetic and you know exactly where you come in it.

Paul saw a room doing arithmetic

The church at Corinth had worked out a ranking, the way a room will, and Paul spends a whole chapter dismantling it. Not softening it. Dismantling it.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22

Take that word necessary and hold it, because it is stronger than anything the room would have offered. Not welcome. Not also valued. Not encouraged to keep serving. Necessary, which is what you call a thing the body cannot work without.

And notice the other word: seem. Which seem to be more feeble. Paul does not concede that they are. He says that is how they look to a room that has started scoring itself, and then he puts the room's scoring the right way up.

Right now, as you read, you are being told by Scripture that you are necessary rather than tolerated, and the Holy Spirit, who Paul says gives to each one severally as He wills in that same chapter, is the one who decided where you go in the body and did not consult the seating plan.

Nothing was ever measured in distance traveled

Here is the arithmetic problem underneath the whole hall, and it is worth naming plainly, because half the people reading this have been carrying it for decades.

The room measures distance traveled. Scripture measures whose you are, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you there. Those are two completely different instruments, and one of them was never in God's hands.

If distance traveled were the currency, then a wasted decade would be an asset and a kept one a liability, which is a sentence nobody in that hall would say out loud and quite a few of them have felt. It also cannot be true, because it would make the mercy of God dependent on how much of it a person needed, and you would end up with the strange doctrine that the safest thing to do with your twenties is ruin them.

You have not been given less of God because less went wrong. Scripture puts the same Spirit in every member and calls the quiet ones necessary, and the Holy Spirit is not distributed by the size of the wreckage He had to clear.

What a father said to the son who never left

There is one sentence in the Gospels spoken directly to a man with no story, and it is the one I want you to have.

The younger son takes the money and goes and ruins it and comes home, and there is a party, and the older one will not come in, and the father goes out to him. And what the father says is not a lecture about gratitude.

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.Luke 15:31

Read it slowly. Thou art ever with me. That is the man's whole complaint turned into a commendation. The very thing he could not put a headline on, the staying, is the first thing out of the father's mouth, and the father names it as fact rather than as consolation.

And then: all that I have is thine. Not will be. Not once you have earned a testimony. It was already his through every single one of the years he thought were not counting for anything, including the ones where he was in the field and nobody was clapping.

You are ever with Him and everything He has is already yours, and it was written down long before you started keeping score against a man who came out of prison in March, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that sentence land in a hall with the lights off at the far end.