I Think I Am Tolerated

She could not build a case. That is the part that has kept her quiet for nine years.

Nobody has been cold to her. Nobody has excluded her from anything. Two women in that building would drop what they were doing if she called, and she knows that, and she has tested it once without meaning to.

She has been invited to things. People are pleased to see her. Somebody remembered her birthday last year without being reminded.

And she has carried, the entire time, a conviction that she is put up with.

Not disliked. Tolerated, which is a different and colder word, and which she has never said out loud because the moment you say it somebody has to reassure you, and being reassured about this is worse than carrying it, because reassurance is exactly what you would get if it were true.

She is forty-three. She has served on two teams for nine years and she is good at both.

And she is standing in a hall after a shared lunch with plates going through to the kitchen and two women laughing by a window, and the thing running underneath is what has always run underneath, which is that these people would be perfectly all right if she were not here, and that they are being good to her the way good people are good to anybody.

Where this is not going

Let me say it plainly at the start, because you have a very good ear for being handled.

Nothing on this page is going to reassure you. I am not going to tell you that those people love you, because I do not know them, and because if I did it would land exactly the way you already predicted in the second paragraph of your own thinking.

And nothing here is going to tell you to serve more, or less, or differently, or to talk to somebody.

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 reassured here, and nothing on this page makes usefulness or anybody's warmth the proof of your place. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a sentence about terms rather than feelings, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman to feel wanted before He would deal with her.

On whose terms you were received

Here is the sentence, and the second half of it is where the weight sits.

Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.Romans 15:7

As Christ also received us.

That is not a comparison of warmth. It is a statement of terms. Paul is telling a divided church how to receive each other and he gives them a standard, and the standard is how Christ did it.

So the question becomes: on what terms did He receive us?

Not on the basis of usefulness. Not because anybody was going to be an asset. Not conditionally, not provisionally, not with a period of review. He received people who were, on the day, actively hostile, at cost to Himself, permanently.

Whatever else is true about that hall, the reception that put you in the body was not conducted on the terms you have been measuring against.

You were received on the terms Christ used rather than the terms a room uses, and those terms had nothing in them about being wanted. I am not stretching that. Romans 15:7 makes His reception the standard and the pattern, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman standing in a hall after a lunch.

The conviction has no evidence and that is the finding

Now let me say something about the shape of what you are carrying, and it is not a criticism.

You have said it yourself: you could not build a case. Nine years and not one incident. You have looked, honestly, in the way that a person looks when they would rather like to find something so at least it would make sense.

There is nothing there.

Which means the conviction is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It arrived before the evidence and it has survived the absence of evidence for nine years, which is not how conclusions behave.

I am not going to tell you where it came from. That would be a stranger diagnosing you and you would be right to refuse it.

But I will say this: a thing that came before the evidence and cannot be moved by the evidence is not going to be settled by evidence either. Which is why nine years of kindness has not touched it and why the birthday did not touch it.

You have not been failing to notice the evidence, you have been carrying something evidence does not reach, and the word puts your place on a footing that is not made of evidence at all. That is Romans 15:7 grounding the reception in Christ rather than in anybody's warmth, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that hall for nine years and is not running the assessment you are running.

And nothing you do can move it either

Here is the part that matters most, and it is the reason this page is not going to give you anything to do.

If your place were made of usefulness, then serving on two teams for nine years would have settled it by now. It has not, and it was never going to, because a thing that is not made of usefulness cannot be secured by more of it.

That cuts both ways and the second way is the freeing one. If nine years of serving did not establish your place, then stopping would not remove it.

You are not on a trial that your work has been quietly extending, and nothing you did this year and nothing you fail to do next year decides whether you stay. The word makes the receiving Christ's act rather than a congregation's, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit is not adjusting the verdict weekly.