Nothing Here to Win

Last day of the school year. The break room smells of instant coffee and the radiator that never goes off. Somebody has brought in a tin of candy and somebody else has cut a lemon cake into pieces too big to eat politely. A card is going around and everybody signs it standing up, on the arm of a chair, apologizing for their handwriting.

The principal thanks a teacher by name for the production. She says the word transformative. Everybody claps, and the teacher does the shy hand wave and says it was a team effort, and that is true and she means it.

The woman rinsing a mug at the sink claps too. She means it as well. She has known that teacher for years and likes her. And then the room moves on, and she stands there with the tap running over her hands longer than a mug needs, doing a sum she did not choose to do. Six years of costumes. Six years of the same wardrobe box hauled out of the storeroom in February and hauled back in July. The two children who could not go on unless somebody sat with them in the corridor first. She was in that corridor. Nobody was in the corridor with her.

You know the feeling from your own version of the room, and the worst part is not the not being named. The worst part is what the sum does to you: that you are a person who counts, that you have become somebody who keeps a private ledger and hates having one, and that the good news about somebody else arrived in you as a subtraction. Turn the tap off and stay here with me for a minute. There is no ledger, and I am not going to talk you out of your feelings before I show you why.

There is no table with your name near the bottom

First, the honest thing. What you did in that corridor was real work and it cost you real evenings, and nobody saying so does not make it smaller. I am not about to tell you that being unseen is secretly better, because that is the kind of sentence people say to close a subject down.

And I am not going to call this envy, either. It is not. Envy wants the other person to have less. You would not want that, and part of you has already checked, which is why you feel so uncomfortable about the whole thing.

What is actually happening is simpler and much older. You have been handed a measuring stick nobody in heaven uses, and the written word never once sets one life beside another to see which came out longer, and the Holy Spirit has never done that arithmetic on your behalf either.

Look at how Jesus takes it out of Peter's hand. It is the last chapter of John, on a beach, straight after the most tender restoration in Scripture. Peter has just been asked three times whether he loves Him and told three times to feed the sheep. And then Peter turns round, sees John walking behind them, and asks the question every one of us asks.

Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, what about this man?" Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!"John 21:21 and 22

Read the tone right. That is not a slap. Peter has just been picked up off the floor of his own failure, and Jesus is not scolding him for looking sideways. He is prising the question out of his fingers, because Peter has been given his own road and cannot walk it while he is comparing it to somebody else's.

So take this the same way. You are not being measured against her, not by God, not this year, not ever. That is not a soothing thing I have decided to say to you; it is what stands in John 21 in black and white, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence from a beach and lays it over a break room sink.

Paul says the same thing in a different key. Let each one test his own work, he writes, and then his reason for boasting will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor, because each one will carry his own load. Galatians 6:4 and 5. There is no shared scoreboard. Your load is yours, her load is hers, and the two were never in the same column.

And here is where it turns from relief into something you can hold.

You have not lost anything. Nothing that was yours went across the room when her name was read out, because God's regard is not a fixed quantity that gets used up on whoever is standing at the front. The one who saw you in the corridor was in the corridor. He does not need the principal's help to know what happened in there, and His Spirit is the witness to every hour of it. The written word says He brings to light the things hidden in darkness, which means the hidden things are not lost things. They are simply not lit yet, and nothing hidden is ever mislaid.

Now, the mouth. This is where it stops being an idea.

You do not have to feel released before you speak like a released person. That is the whole mechanism and it is the opposite of how most of us were taught. Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that a faith the size of a seed, a thing you would not bother to pick up off the floor, speaks to a mountain and the mountain moves. The mountain here is a sum. You have the standing to speak to it, because Matthew 17 puts the speaking in the hands of anybody with a seed and because Christ is in you, and He appointed speaking as the way this works. Whether the feeling follows today is the Holy Spirit's business, not yours.