They Come For Me

She tested it by accident, which is the only way anybody ever finds this out.

She was ill for three weeks in the spring. Properly ill, in bed, not able to do anything, and other people stepped up and were kind and it was all handled well and nobody complained.

Nine came the first week instead of the usual twenty odd. Seven the second. On the third week it was five, and one of them rang her that afternoon to see how she was and mentioned, without meaning anything at all by it, that it had been a bit flat.

She got better and it went back up within a fortnight.

And she has not been able to put it down since.

She is good at this. That is the whole difficulty. She is warm, she is genuinely interested in people, she remembers what somebody said six weeks ago and asks about it, and when she speaks it lands. None of that is a performance and she is not trying to be the center of anything.

But she is now the load bearing wall.

Twenty odd people who are attached, in a way none of them would say out loud and most of them would deny, to her being in the room. And she has known it since the third week of being ill and she has not been able to say it to one person, because there is no way to say it that does not sound either like a complaint or like showing off.

He must increase, but I must decrease

Sit down at the back of that circle a minute, because John the Baptist says one sentence about this, and the circumstances he says it in are worth noticing.

His disciples come to him upset. The crowds are going to Jesus now. It is their teacher they are worried about, and their word for it is that everybody is going to Him, and they say it as bad news.

He must increase, but I must decrease.John 3:30

Now hold on to what John's work actually was.

It was real. It was his, and it was enormous, and Scripture records that all Judea and the region round about Jordan went out to him. He was not a man with a failing ministry making the best of it. He had the largest gathering in the country and the Lord Himself said no man born of woman was greater.

And he says: I must decrease.

Not because the work was fake, and not because he had done it wrong. Because the whole point of it was somebody else, and a man who understands that says that sentence gladly rather than sadly, and John says it in the middle of what reads like the best year of his life.

Hear this at the back of your own circle. There is nothing wrong with you, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has a man say I must decrease about a work that was genuinely his and genuinely good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the warmth in you that fills that room in the first place.

Now let me name what has happened, because it is not ego and ego is a wrong and cruel word for a woman who is ill in bed worrying about attendance.

You did not build this on purpose and nobody set out for it to be this way.

A gathering leans on whatever is strongest in it. That is not a moral failing in the group and it is not manipulation by you: it is simply what a room does. You were the warmest and the most consistent and the most able, and over about four years the weight moved on to you the way water finds a channel, and nobody decided it and nobody noticed and now it is a wall.

Hear this too, and let it land in that room. You are not being told to be less, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has John speak that sentence gladly about the best work of his own life, and the Spirit of God has never once asked a woman to dim what He put in her.

And let me be plain, because this is where these pages go wrong. Nobody here is promising you that the room will hold up when you step back, and nobody is telling you it will grow. It might drop. It dropped to five in three weeks in the spring and it might do that again, and this article is not going to pretend otherwise, and a smaller room is not a failure and never was.