I Am Always The Substitute

Her phone goes on a Saturday evening more often than any other time in the week, and she knows what it is before she looks.

Somebody cannot make it.

Eight years of that. She can do about five different things in that church, competently, at short notice, which is a genuinely unusual set of capabilities and which she has built almost by accident out of eight years of standing in for people.

She is good at it. She is calm about it. She has never once said no, which is a fact she is not entirely comfortable with and has examined more than once.

And they trust her. That is not in doubt. Being the person you call at eight on a Saturday evening is a form of trust that not many people get.

She is forty-one.

And what she has understood about her own position, gradually, over about three years, and has never said to anybody, is that she does not have one.

Her place in that church is made entirely of other people's absences. It exists in the negative space. Everything she does there, she does because somebody else could not, and if everybody in that building turned up reliably for six months she would have nothing at all to do and nobody would notice, because there would be nothing missing.

What is not on this page

Let me say it plainly at the start, because you are quick and you have been quick about this for three years.

Nothing here is going to suggest you ask for something permanent, put your name down for a team, or say no next time. This page cannot see your church and has no business steering any of that.

And nothing here is going to tell you what you are for.

And nothing here is going to ask you for anything at all beyond one small thing with your hands.

You are not going to be told to get a proper position, and nothing here makes holding one the proof of your place. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one verse about how a body is held together, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman to have a slot before He would deal with her.

What the joints are doing

Here is the sentence, and the picture in it is anatomical and specific.

From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.Ephesians 4:16

By that which every joint supplieth.

A joint is not a part in the sense that a hand or an eye is. It is not a lump of tissue with a name that a child could point to. A joint is where two things meet and are held.

And Paul says the whole body is compacted, held together, by what the joints supply.

Which is a strange thing to build a sentence around, unless you have ever thought about what happens to a body whose joints stop supplying. It does not lose a feature. It comes apart.

You are being described by a verse about the thing that holds a body together rather than about the parts that get pointed at, and Paul builds the sentence on the joints on purpose. I am not stretching that. Ephesians 4:16 makes the compacting the work of what every joint supplies, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman looking at her phone at eight on a Saturday evening.

Negative space is a real category in a body

Now the thing that follows, and it is the correction three years have needed.

You have been reading your position as absence, as the shape left over when other people are missing. And that reading is accurate as a description of how you get called.

But a body is full of things that exist exactly like that.

The space between two bones is not nothing. It is a joint, and it is the reason an arm works, and if you removed the space and fused the bones the arm would stop being an arm. In anatomy the gap is a structure. It is the most load-bearing kind of structure there is, and it is invisible on any diagram that only draws the parts.

You have been describing yourself as negative space as though that meant you were nothing, and negative space in a body is where the holding happens.

You have been describing a joint and calling it a gap, and the word makes the joints the thing that compacts the body rather than a leftover between parts. That is Ephesians 4:16 in its own anatomy, and the Spirit who searches all things has been on every one of those Saturday evening calls for eight years.

And the place is not the calls either

One more thing, because you will otherwise take the last section as a compliment about your usefulness and this page is not that.

If your place were made of being called, then a quiet six months would end it, and you have thought about that quiet six months, and it is the thought underneath the whole three years.

The quiet six months would not touch it. Not because you would still be secretly useful. Because your place was never made of the calls at all, and a body does not review its membership when a person is not currently in demand.

Which means the calls are consequence, not foundation, and the thing you have been afraid of does not have the power you have been giving it.

You are not held in that body by anybody's need for you, and a quiet six months has no jurisdiction over a thing it did not establish. The word puts the joining in Christ from whom the whole body is joined, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit is not tallying your Saturdays.