I Answer The Church Phone

The number on the sign outside that building, and on the website, and on nine hundred printed things going back a decade, rings on her cell.

It has done since a Tuesday eleven years ago when the office arrangement changed and somebody said would you mind just for now and she said of course.

Most of it is nothing. A man about a hall booking who does not want the hall and wants to talk. Somebody selling something. A wrong number from a woman who has been calling that wrong number for six years and who she has stopped correcting because the woman enjoys the exchange.

And then it is not nothing.

Twice this year she has answered at about nine at night to somebody in a state she is not equipped for. She does the same thing every time: she stays on, she does not try to fix it, she gets them to somebody who is equipped, and then she sits in her kitchen afterward for a while.

Eleven years.

Nobody has ever asked her whether she still wants to do this. That is not neglect. It is that the arrangement has become invisible in the way that a thing does when it works. There is no meeting where the phone comes up because the phone gets answered.

And so she is in a curious position, which she has thought about carefully and never said out loud: she carries a thing that has no owner, that nobody knows she carries, that exists entirely because of one sentence she said on a Tuesday over a decade ago, and that she has never once been able to think of a way to raise.

Where this does not go

Straight out, because you are quick and you have had a long day.

Nothing on this page is going to suggest you raise it, hand it over, or say anything to anybody. Nobody here can see your church or that number or who else could take it, and a page that cannot see those things has no business steering you.

And nothing here is going to promise you that somebody will notice. I do not know that. You may carry this another eleven years without anybody once asking.

And nothing here is going to hold you up as an example or tell you that hidden work outranks visible work. It does not, and you would not thank me for it.

You are not being steered anywhere and you are not being consoled, and nothing on this page asks you to be pleased about being unasked. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one clause where God is the one doing the giving, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman reconciled to being filler before He would speak to her.

God does the bestowing

Here is the sentence, and the subject of the verb is the whole thing.

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour... But God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked.1 Corinthians 12:23-24

Read the two halves against each other, because Paul is doing something careful.

First he describes what people do: we bestow. Which is about how a congregation dresses up and arranges and pays attention to certain parts.

Then he turns and describes what God did: God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked.

Same phrase, different subject. And the second one is in the perfect tense, which means it is already done.

The honor a room gives is a variable thing and it goes where rooms send it. The honor God gave went, deliberately, to the part that was short of it, and it went there before anybody in that church had an opinion.

You have already been given more abundant honor by God, and the giving of it was aimed specifically at the part that lacked. I am not stretching that. 1 Corinthians 12:24 has God as the subject of the giving in the perfect tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman sitting in her kitchen after a nine o'clock call.

To that part which lacked

And now the phrase that is doing the specific work.

To that part which lacked.

He does not say the honor was distributed evenly. He says it was aimed. It went to the place where there was a shortage of it.

Which means the arrangement you have been describing to yourself as being overlooked is, in the terms of that verse, the exact address the honor was sent to.

I am not saying that makes it comfortable. It does not. You still carry a phone nobody knows about and you still sit in your kitchen at half past nine.

But the sentence rules out the reading you have been running, which is that the place with no attention on it is the place with nothing on it.

You are standing in the place Scripture says the honor was deliberately directed toward, and that was settled before anybody in that church noticed anything. That is 1 Corinthians 12:24 in its own construction, and the Spirit who searches all things has been on every one of those calls with you for eleven years.

The woman with the wrong number

Now the specific thing, because you have never counted it.

There is a woman who has been calling a wrong number for six years and you have stopped correcting her.

You do not know her name. She does not know she is calling a church. She calls, she says something, you talk to her for two or three minutes, she is pleased, she goes.

Six years.

That is somewhere north of a hundred and fifty conversations with a person who has, by every available indication, nobody else who picks up.

Nobody in the world knows about that except you and her, and she does not know what she has found.

You have been somebody's only picked-up call for six years and no record of it exists anywhere. The word says God sees in secret, and Matthew 6:4 says it without any suggestion a witness would improve it, and the Spirit who bears witness has been on the line every one of those times.