Easier to Be Needed

If you call him at eleven at night because your car has died, he will be there in twenty minutes and he will be glad.

Genuinely glad. Not putting a good face on it. Something in him settles when the phone goes and there is a problem on the other end of it, and he has never fully examined that and would say, if you asked, that he likes helping people, which is true and is not the interesting part.

Here is the interesting part. Last spring a friend invited him to something with no purpose. A weekend, four of them, nothing to do, no reason. And he said yes and then found a reason not to go about nine days out, and the reason was real enough to withstand scrutiny, and he has thought about it since and knows perfectly well that he found it rather than encountered it.

He is forty four. He has a great many people who would describe him as a close friend, and the description is not wrong, and every one of those friendships has a shape, and the shape is that he does something.

He is the person you call. He is not, particularly, the person you sit with.

And this is not a complaint. Nobody has done this to him. He built it, over about twenty years, out of a thousand small preferences, each of which was reasonable at the time. Being needed is a transaction he understands completely: there is a request, and a response, and a clear end, and at no point does anybody have to decide anything about him.

Being loved is not a transaction and has no shape and no end, and there is nothing in it to do, and he does not know where to put his hands.

He would find it hard to say this out loud and has never tried. The closest he has got is a thought that arrived on the drive back from that car at half past eleven, which was: I am much better at this than at the other thing.

You will have your own eleven at night. The call you are glad to get, and the invitation you cannot quite accept.

The five words that put the order right

There is a sentence in John's first letter that is so short people race past it, and the whole of it is in the sequence.

We love because he first loved us.1 John 4:19

First. Everything in that sentence hangs on one word about order.

John is not saying God loves us a lot, or that we should love in response as a duty. He is describing which move came first, and the answer is that ours was second, always, structurally, and that our capacity for it is derived rather than original.

Which means the whole thing began with a transaction he did not participate in. Nobody called him. He did not arrive with a jack and jumper cables. Something was done, before he was in the room, on the other side of the arrangement entirely, and his part in it was to be the one it was done to.

So take it plainly: you are on the receiving end of the first move, and that is what 1 John 4 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes five words from an old letter and lays them down on a highway at half past eleven at night.

And notice what that does to the thing he cannot do. His difficulty is not with love in general; he is extremely good at the version where he supplies it. His difficulty is with receiving, and John says receiving is not the advanced module, it is the foundation. Everybody in that verse is a receiver first. There is no other way anybody got in.

Which means the weekend with no purpose is not a test he might fail. It is the shape of the actual thing, and he has been living a slightly narrower version of it for twenty years without knowing that the wider one was the original.

You have been loved before you were useful, and the order was settled before you were consulted, because the written word puts the first move on God's side rather than ours, and His Spirit is what makes that land in the hands of a man who does not know where to put them.

What the twenty years are not

Now the guardrail, because a man like this will take this article and turn it into a project by Thursday.

The twenty years of being the person people call are not a mistake, and they are not a mask to be stripped off. Real people got real help. A man who arrives at eleven at night is not performing. The problem is not that he does too much; it is that he has only one door and he has been using it for everything.

And nothing about the doing was ever buying anything. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with jumper cables, and you were held by it before the first call came, because Scripture puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

And there is no target here. Nobody is telling him to accept the next invitation or to have a breakthrough about it. You have nothing to fix by the weekend and nothing to prove by accepting, because the written word never sets receiving as a task, and His Spirit is what keeps a truth from becoming one more thing a capable man is failing at.