They Gave My Thing To Somebody Else

It was handled well. He wants that said first because it is true and because he has said it to himself about four hundred times and it has never once helped.

Somebody came and talked to him about it beforehand. There were reasons and the reasons were good and he agreed with most of them at the time and still does. There was a genuine thank you, in front of people, which was not perfunctory.

And a younger man now does the thing he did for eleven years, and does it differently, and is doing it perfectly well.

That is the whole event. There is nothing to complain about and he has not complained.

He is fifty-six and it happened seven months ago and he is standing in a hall at a shared breakfast with a tray going past, and what has settled in him over those seven months is not resentment, which he has checked for carefully.

It is a conclusion.

Which is that if a thing can be handed to somebody else, it was never a place. It was a slot. And he was in it, and now he is not, and the fact that it moved so smoothly is the proof: places do not move, slots do, and what he had for eleven years was clearly the second kind.

Which raises the question he has not been able to put down since about the third month, which is whether he has ever had the first kind of thing anywhere.

What is not coming

Let me be plain before anything else, because seven months of being handled well has left you with a low tolerance for it.

Nothing here is going to defend the decision or criticize it. This page cannot see your church and does not know the reasons and has no view.

And nothing here is going to suggest you find something else to do, or offer to help the younger man, or take something on to replace it.

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 redirected and nothing here makes holding a slot the proof of your place. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in the last three words of a sentence, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to be doing something before He would deal with him.

Members in particular

Here is the sentence, and the ending is where the whole weight sits.

Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.1 Corinthians 12:27

Members in particular.

The phrase means individually. Severally. Each one as himself. The old translators reached for in particular because Paul is not saying you are members in a general sense or members as a category. He is saying it lands on each one specifically.

And that rules something out, which is exactly what has been sitting on you for seven months.

Interchangeability. A slot is a slot precisely because anybody can occupy it and the slot does not care who. Members in particular is the opposite construction. You cannot have a particular hand replaced by a general hand.

You are a member in particular, which is a phrase that rules out the exact category you have concluded you were in. I am not stretching that. 1 Corinthians 12:27 ends with the individualizing phrase on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man standing in a hall with a tray going past.

The slot and the place were always two things

Now the plain thing, and it is the correction that seven months have needed.

You have been treating the eleven years and your place in that body as one object. That is not stupid. They occupied the same space in your life for over a decade and nobody could separate them from inside.

But they were always two things, and the reassignment separated them, and what you have been looking at for seven months is the wreckage of the first one and reading it as the wreckage of both.

The slot moved. Slots move. That is what they are for and it is not a scandal and the younger man is doing fine.

The place did not move, because it was never the same object, and no meeting anywhere had jurisdiction over it.

You are looking at one thing that genuinely ended and concluding that a second thing ended with it, and the word puts your membership in a category that no reassignment can reach. That is 1 Corinthians 12:27 in its own phrase, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that building for all eleven years and the seven months.

And the harder question

Now the one you have not put down since the third month, which is whether you have ever had a place anywhere.

I am not going to answer that about your life, because I cannot see it and it would be a stranger guessing.

What I will say is that the question is built on the same collapse. You have been testing for a place by looking for something that could not be taken away, and everything visible can be taken away, and so the test returns nothing, every time, about everything.

The word puts the thing you are looking for in a category that is not visible and not reassignable and not held by any arrangement. Which means your test was searching the wrong place, and its coming back empty was never information.

You have been running a test on the visible for seven months and the word puts your place somewhere the test does not reach. The phrase is in particular and it is about a person rather than a function, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit has not been reassigned to anybody.