Everybody Signed Up In September

Ten past nine on a Thursday and the common room has that specific smell of instant coffee and wet coats and somebody having brought a bag of chips to share too early in the evening.

Twenty of them. A guy playing the same four chords on a guitar with no real intention of starting a song. Two girls with their heads together over a phone, laughing at something in a way that makes everybody else want to know. The one who always stays behind to stack the mugs.

And a nineteen year old with her coat already on, standing near the door, having stayed exactly long enough to not be rude.

She started in February. That is the whole thing, though she would struggle to explain why it is the whole thing.

Because in September there had been a fair, and a big list, and everybody had signed up for something, and by the time she arrived in the second semester every one of those things had a person in it. The prayer thing has a person. The music has three. The Tuesday visits have a rotation with a group chat she is not in and has never once been curious enough to ask about, because asking would sound like she wanted something.

Nobody has excluded her. Everybody is nice. And still she stands by the door with her coat on doing the arithmetic that nineteen year olds are very good at, which goes: whatever there is to be given out here was given out before I got here, and there is no polite way to arrive five months late and ask what is left.

Just so you know what this is not

Getting this out of the way up front, so you can read the rest with your coat off.

This is not going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you closely enough that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the bottom that you can go down until something matches. There is no quiz coming. There is no gentler quiz coming either.

That is not me being careful. The chapter everyone opens when a person asks what am I for does not answer that question, and honestly, once you see that, February stops meaning what you thought it meant.

You are not standing at the back of a room where everything has already been allocated, and you are not five months behind anything. That is not a pep talk. Scripture is what says it, in 1 Corinthians 12, and the Holy Spirit has never run a sign-up sheet in His life.

The chapter is not about vacancies

Here is the thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to see.

Every conversation about gifts that a young person overhears is a conversation about roles. Who is doing worship. Who is on the welcome team. Who got asked. And roles genuinely do work the way she thinks they work: there are a certain number of them, they get filled, and if you turn up in February the good ones are gone.

Paul is not talking about that at all. He is talking about a body, and a body does not have vacancies.

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.1 Corinthians 12:12

A hand is not a position that opened up. A hand is what that part of the body is. Nobody applied. Nobody was late.

You have a place in something that was never organized by a sign-up sheet, and it is not a slot that somebody else could have taken before you arrived. That is not me being poetic about it. The image in 1 Corinthians 12:12 is a body rather than a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an image like that go from clever to true in a person standing by a door with her coat on.

Then the sentence, and it is one line

Paul argues it out for six verses and then he lands it.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

Read it slowly, because there are three things in it and every one of them is about you.

God set. Not the fair in September. Not the person with the clipboard and the good handwriting. Not the accident of what week your family moved.

Every one of them. Individually, one at a time, by name. Not the keen ones, not the early ones, not the ones who found the table on the first day.

As it hath pleased Him. Which is a decision, taken on purpose, by someone who wanted it exactly this way.

You were set in this body by God Himself, deliberately, and the spot you are standing in on a Thursday night is the spot He chose. That is what 1 Corinthians 12:18 says in plain words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and makes it feel like it has your name in it rather than somebody else's.

There is no line in that verse about arrival order. There is no waiting list. And Paul goes on and it gets stronger rather than softer, because he says the parts that look least impressive are the ones the body cannot do without.

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

What is actually true about February

So let me say the honest thing about the thing she is experiencing, because pretending it is imaginary would be no use to her.

She is right that the roles were filled in September. That is just true. Roles are a human system and human systems have a calendar, and a person who arrives in February will look around a room and see a group that formed without her in it. That is not paranoia. That is observation.

What is not true is the second half, the part she added without noticing: therefore there is nothing here that was meant for me.

Those two sentences feel like one sentence when you are standing by a door. They are not one sentence. The first is about a semester. The second is about God, and He did not consult the semester.

You are already in the body, right now, before anybody asks you for anything, and no group chat you are not in has any bearing on that at all. The word is explicit that the setting was God's own doing and that it pleased Him, and the Spirit gives to each one as He wills rather than as the September table happened to fill up.

And none of this makes you a critic of the people who signed up early. They are good and busy and they are not thinking about you standing by the door, and that is not a wound, it is just Thursday.