The Books Are Immaculate

They thanked her again. Fourteenth year in a row. Somebody clapped and then everybody clapped, which is what happens, and it was warm and it was meant.

The hall afterward is the good part of an annual meeting and always has been. Folding chairs half cleared. Cake that somebody made and somebody else brought and a third person is now cutting badly. The old upright along the wall that gets played every Christmas by a man who insists he cannot play. Two people standing in the doorway continuing an argument from the meeting in a much friendlier register.

She is by the window with a cup, being congratulated in ones and twos.

The books are immaculate. She would tell you that herself and it is not pride, it is a fact you could verify. Fourteen years and not one discrepancy, not one late filing, not one question a person asked that she could not answer inside two minutes. An accountant looked at them once and said something she has never repeated to anybody because it would sound like boasting.

And she is standing at that window at sixty, holding a cup she is not drinking, feeling nothing at all.

That is the part she cannot say. Not unhappy. Not resentful. Not tired. Nothing.

It came on so gradually that she cannot date it. Somewhere around year six it stopped being a thing she did and became a thing she completed. And now, fourteen years in, being thanked in public produces in her exactly the same quantity of feeling as filing a form, which is none, and she has begun to wonder in a way that frightens her whether the flatness is about the accounts at all or whether something has gone quiet in her generally.

Plainly, first

Let me say what this is not, because you have been handled kindly for fourteen years and you can hear a nudge coming from a long way off.

This page is not going to suggest you resign, hand over, take a year off, or say a word to anybody. Not tonight and not by implication at the end. Nobody here can see your church or its books or who else could do it, and a page that cannot see those things has no business steering them.

And it is not going to tell you what you should be doing instead. There is no list at the bottom and there is no exercise coming.

You are not being maneuvered anywhere, and there is nothing you have to decide this evening. That is not caution on my part. Scripture is what makes room for the plain sentence before any decision at all, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman to have a plan before He would meet her.

The apostles say it and nobody is insulted

There is a moment in Acts that people use to talk about church structure, and underneath the structure it is a scene about twelve men saying a true and awkward thing out loud.

A real need has come up. Widows are being missed in the daily distribution. It matters, and nobody in that story thinks it does not.

And here is what the twelve say to the whole congregation.

It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables.Acts 6:2

Read what is not there.

There is no suggestion that serving tables is beneath anybody. Seven men are appointed to it immediately and the text describes them in glowing terms, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, and one of them is Stephen, who is about to become the most extraordinary person in the chapter.

The apostles are not saying the work is small. They are saying it is not theirs. Those are entirely different sentences and only one of them insults anybody.

You are allowed to say that a needed thing is not yours without one syllable of it being a judgment on the thing or on the people who do it. I am not softening the text. Acts 6:2 has them say the flat sentence in public and Acts 6:3 has them honor the work in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written scene like that and hands a woman a sentence she thought did not exist.

Flat is not the same as faithless

Now the frightening part, said as plainly as I can.

You have started to wonder whether the flatness is about the accounts or about you. Whether something has gone out generally. That is a serious thing to wonder at sixty and I am not going to be breezy about it.

Here is what I can say and what I cannot.

I cannot tell you what is happening in you. I have not met you and anybody who diagnoses a stranger's interior from a distance is doing something they should not.

What I can tell you is that fourteen years of doing a thing that does not fit will produce exactly the sensation you are describing, and it will produce it in a healthy person, and it does not require any explanation beyond itself. A person who spends a long time using a small part of themselves and no other part goes quiet. That is not a spiritual condition. That is what happens.

You are not necessarily looking at a fault in yourself, and the word never once treats a poor fit as a defect in the person occupying it. The apostles named a mismatch without pathologizing anybody, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that window with you tonight and is not standing there diagnosing you.

And the thing that has cost you most

Here is the deeper part, and it is not about the accounts either.

For eight years or so there has been a real, recurring, describable fact about your week that has never been said to God. Not in rebellion. Because the only phrasing available made you sound like a woman complaining about being appreciated, and nobody hands God a sentence they are ashamed of.

Which means the flatness has been carried privately rather than handed over, and that is a different arrangement and it costs a great deal more.

He has known since about year six. Nothing you say tonight is information.

You are welcome to say the ashamed sentence out loud to Him, and He has never once asked you to pretend an annual meeting moved you. Scripture is full of people bringing God flat and unresolved things without dressing them up, and the Spirit who was given to help us is not waiting for a better draft of it.