Everyone In My Hall Got The Same Result

Half past ten and everybody has ended up on the stairs, which is where everything actually happens and never where anybody intended.

Six of them on three steps. Mugs. Somebody's blanket that has been in circulation since October and no longer belongs to anyone. The fire door propped with a shoe, which is against about four rules and has been that way since the first week.

They had done the thing at small group, the assessment with the forty questions, and now they are comparing, which is inevitable and was probably going to be more fun than the exercise.

And in about ninety seconds a thing becomes apparent on those stairs.

Four of the six got the same top result.

Her included.

Everybody thinks this is hilarious. Somebody says something about the questions being too easy to guess. The girl on the bottom step, who got something different and slightly odd, is delighted with herself and everybody is delighted for her.

And the twenty year old halfway up, laughing along, is having an experience she cannot name and would be embarrassed to try.

Because if the word had been wrong, she could have argued with it. If it had been strange she could have carried it around all week and thought about it.

But it was the same as three other people's. And what that produced in her, sitting on a stair with a mug going cold, is a feeling she has had before and has never once said out loud: that there is probably nothing particular about her, and that this is the first time a piece of paper has said so.

What this page is not doing

Straight away, because you are twenty and you can smell a setup.

This is not going to give you a better result. Not a more unusual one, not a rarer one, not one that finally distinguishes you from the three other people on those stairs. I am not going to describe you closely enough that you can take it as a diagnosis, and there is no list at the bottom for you to find yourself on.

And it is not going to tell you that you are secretly unique in a way nobody has noticed yet, because that is the same trick in a nicer coat and it wears off by Thursday.

You are not waiting on a word that would prove you are particular, and there is no more distinctive category out there that would settle what those stairs unsettled. That is not me being reassuring. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a person differentiated before He would deal with her.

The most specific verse in the Bible is about hair

Here is a sentence Jesus says, and it is easy to hear as a nice thought and it is not a nice thought, it is an argument.

But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.Matthew 10:30

Numbered. Counted individually. Which is a level of attention that is, frankly, absurd, and He means it to sound absurd, because He is making a point about scale.

Notice what He does not say. He does not say the hairs on your head are a distinctive color. He does not say they are unlike anybody else's. He says they are counted, and counted one at a time.

That is a completely different kind of knowing than a category. A category tells you which group you fall in. Counting tells you that somebody went through one by one.

You are known one at a time, at a level of detail no assessment on earth could reach, and being in a group of four never once diluted that. I am not stretching the verse. Matthew 10:30 is deliberately the most granular claim in the chapter, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it land on a person sitting on a stair with a cold mug.

Categories were never going to do this

Now the plain thing, and it is worth having because it will save you a lot of time.

Any instrument that sorts people has to put them in groups. That is what sorting is. If everyone came out unique the tool would be useless and nobody could talk about it.

So the fact that four of you landed in the same box is not information about how unremarkable you are. It is information about how boxes work.

And here is the part worth keeping: the four of you are not the same. Everybody on those stairs knows that, in detail, from living in a hall together. Nobody would confuse you for a moment. You could each name eight ways the other three differ and every one of those ways would be real and none of them would show up on a forty question grid.

You already have all the evidence. What you do not have, and what a chart cannot give you, is the confidence that it matters.

You have never once been reduced to the category a tool put you in, because the thing that makes you particular was never the kind of thing a tool measures. The word says the counting goes down to hairs, and the Spirit who searches all things is not working from a scoring grid on a stair landing.

What you were actually hoping for

Let me say the honest bit, and you can put it down if it is not yours.

You were not hoping to find out what your gift is. You are twenty and you will find that out slowly, by doing things, like everybody does.

You were hoping to be told you are not interchangeable. That is a much older question and it is a good and human one and it is not vanity.

And a word that three other people also got felt, for about forty seconds on a stairwell, like an answer to it. It was not an answer to it. It was not even addressed to it.

You are not interchangeable and you never have been, and the settled fact of that has never depended on a result that nobody else received. The word puts the knowing at hairs counted one at a time, and the Spirit who was given to you was not distributed by category either.