The work is done and the yard is loud and somebody has brought the lemonade out in the good pitcher, which is how you know it was a real day.
Two dozen people. Boys carrying folding tables in stacks of four because carrying six would be showing off and carrying two would be admitting something. Somebody's little girl asleep sideways in a chair with her shoes still on. Two men arguing pleasantly about a gate.
And on the porch, a woman of seventy-one with a bowl on her knees, working through the last of the beans because somebody has to and she is quick at it.
They are good to her. That is the thing. They bring her a chair before she asks. Somebody carried her bowl out for her, which was thoughtful, and she let them. When she stood up earlier two people moved at once.
And somewhere in the middle of all that kindness, sitting in the best chair with the best view, she has become aware of a thing she has not said to a living soul.
She used to be one of them. Now she is one of the people they are nice to.
She cannot point to the day it changed. Nobody announced it. Nobody meant it. But it has happened, and she has begun to suspect that she stopped being a member of that body a while back and started being a guest of honor, and there is no way on earth to raise that at a workday without sounding like a woman fishing for something.
What this will not do to you
Plain first, so you can hear the rest with your shoulders down.
This is not going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you close enough that you take it for a diagnosis, and not by putting a list at the bottom of the page for you to run your finger down. There is no test coming, and there is no gentler test either.
That is not caution. The chapter everybody opens when a person asks what am I for does not do that, and once you see that it does not, a good many years stop meaning what you thought they meant.
You are not being managed, and you have not been quietly moved onto a list of people to be nice to. That is not my opinion of you, and I have never met you. Scripture is what says it, over in 1 Corinthians 12, and the Holy Spirit does not keep a separate arrangement for the ones who have slowed down.
Paul says many before he says anything else
The verse everybody quotes is verse 18. I want to sit four verses earlier, on a line that gets read straight past.
For the body is not one member, but many.1 Corinthians 12:14
That is not a throwaway. It is the whole floor the rest of the chapter stands on.
A body is not one thing that has some helpers. It is many members, and the many is not a problem to be tidied. The many is the design.
Which means the porch is not the sidelines of the yard. The yard and the porch are both the body, and the woman with the bowl is not watching the work. She is in the work, in the part of it that was hers today.
You have not been moved to the edge of anything, because His word does not have an edge in it to be moved to. I did not invent that reading. Verse 14 says many, and verse 18 says God set every one of them, and the Spirit who is described a few lines earlier gives to each one as He wills, not as each one can still carry a table.
Kindness is not a demotion, though it feels like one
Here is where an older woman gets tripped, and it is worth naming out loud because nobody names it.
When you were forty, your place in that church was visible in what you carried. Now people carry things for you. Nothing has been taken from you. Something has been given to you. But it arrives looking exactly like being retired, and the heart cannot always tell the difference in the moment.
So the sum gets done quietly on a porch: they do things for me now, therefore I am no longer one of the ones who does. And that sum is wrong in a way the chapter goes out of its way to correct.
If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?1 Corinthians 12:15
Read what the foot is actually claiming. Not I am useless. Feet are not useless. The foot says I am not the other one anymore, so I must not be in.
Paul does not soothe that. He corrects it. Is it therefore not of the body. No. The conclusion never followed.
You are a member of that body today on exactly the terms you were a member of it at thirty, because the terms were never your capacity. The written word puts the false conclusion down in ink so a woman can hear it out loud and know the voice, and the Spirit who breathed that sentence is not on the porch agreeing with it.
Set is a word with no expiration on it
Then the sentence everybody quotes, and it is worth reading like you have never heard it.
But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18
Set. Not lent. Not seated pending review. Set.
Every one of them. Individually. Not the strong ones and the fast ones and the ones who can still get up on a ladder.
As it hath pleased Him. Which is a decision, taken on purpose, by someone who wanted it this way.
There is no clause in that verse about a term of service. There is no line about the arrangement lapsing when the knees do. God does not run a body where the members are set in and then quietly unset when they slow down, and if He did, Paul would have had to say so, and he says the opposite about the parts that look feeble.
Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22
You are necessary in that body right now, and that is not a compliment paid to you, it is the word's own verdict on the parts that look weakest. I am not softening it and I am not stretching it. It says necessary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word like that and lays it on a person until they can feel the weight of it.
And none of this makes you a judge of the young ones carrying tables. That was never yours. This is about one woman and one bowl.
So come back to the porch, and the beans, and the good chair somebody moved for you.
The kindness was never the injury. The kindness is real and you should keep letting them. What has been wearing on you is a conclusion you drew in silence, because nobody ever announced that you were still in, and you assumed from the way things had gone that the arrangement had quietly lapsed.
It did not lapse. There is no lapsing in that verse. There is a setting, it was done by God, it pleased Him to do it, and He has not revised it.
You are set in this body, He did the setting, He chose the spot, and none of it is under review this afternoon. That is one written line of Paul's letter, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a written line into ground a woman can stand on at seventy-one, and God does not retire the members He was pleased to place.
That is not something to work out over another winter. It is something to say out loud on a porch with a bowl on your knees, and then to go on doing the ordinary thing you were doing, sitting differently while you do it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, on the porch, in the kitchen, wherever you are sitting when you finish reading. Christ is in you and you are in Him, and that standing was given to you rather than worked up by you, which is exactly why a woman with slow hands can talk this way. Scripture is the ground under it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely true on paper, and how any of it unfolds from here is His to decide. What is being asked of you is two sentences and a bowl of beans. That is small enough for this afternoon, and it stands on the Name and not on how convinced you feel.
- Suspicion that I have been retired, you are not the word on me. Scripture says the body is not one member but many, and that God set the members every one of them, so my place on this porch was His arrangement and not a kindness somebody extended.
- Fear that I became a guest in my own church, get out of this house. The Holy Spirit gives to each one as He wills and the word calls the parts that seem feeblest necessary, and in the name of Jesus I am sitting where I was set.
- Lord, You set me in this body Yourself and it pleased You to do it. I thank You, because You have never once unset a member You were pleased to place, and this afternoon I am glad to be exactly where I am.
1 Corinthians 12:14
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