I Am At The Desk During The Response

There is one part of the morning he can never leave, and it is the same part every week.

The response comes at the end. The band goes quiet and stays quiet for a long time, which means somebody has to be riding the faders so the room does not fill up with hiss, and somebody has to catch the speaker's microphone when he steps off the platform and starts talking to people, and somebody has to be ready for the moment when a person on the floor is handed a microphone and speaks into it wrong.

That somebody has been him for eleven years, and he is good at it, and he has never once resented it.

But he has watched every single response in that building from behind a mixer at the back, with headphones half on, and there has never been a week when he could put his hands in his pockets and simply be a man in a room where God was doing something.

He does not put it that way out loud. What he says, if anybody asks, is that he serves at the desk. What he thinks, when the room is quiet and the faders are steady, is that the whole eleven years have gone past with him just outside it.

If your post keeps you at the back, get a coffee and sit down. Nothing about the front, or about one person who has walked to it, is going to be run down here.

Serving was never a substitute for asking

Let us name the trade he has been making, because he did not notice himself making it and it was not required of him.

Somewhere early on, being useful took the place of being met. It happens quietly to almost everybody who serves for long enough. The job is real, the job is needed, and a person who is needed rarely stops to ask whether he has been given anything himself, because asking feels like a strange use of a man who is already busy.

But nothing in his duty ever said he could not ask while he was doing it. He invented that. Eleven years of standing still and saying nothing was a habit, and not a rule handed down by anybody.

You are not just outside what God is doing on Sunday. Nothing about a post you have to keep has ever put you beyond His reach in that room. I am not saying that to flatter a man who is good at his job. The written word says as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff (1 Samuel 30:24), which settles a question about the ones who stayed back, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man with headphones half on.

The ruling about the ones who stayed with the equipment

Here is what turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who goes forward.

Read the ruling David makes, and read who it was made about.

But as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff: they shall part alike.1 Samuel 30:24

Tarrieth by the stuff. That is the man who stayed with the baggage because somebody had to, and there were two hundred of them, and the argument in that chapter was about whether they should get a share at all.

The ruling is not a consolation for them. It is they shall part alike, which is the same share, and it was made a statute in Israel from that day forward.

You are counted with the ones who went in, and Scripture makes that a standing statute rather than a kindness. That is written into the ruling itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a man at a desk eleven years deep.

Nothing here is against the front or the ones who reach it

Something has to be said plainly, or this turns into a quiet grievance dressed up as a teaching.

What happens at the front of that room is real. The people who walk up are not performing, the speaker who comes off the platform to talk to them is doing exactly what he should, and eleven years of watching it has not been eleven years of watching a show. He knows that better than most people in the building, because he has heard all of it through headphones.

The relief is not that the front matters less than it looks.

You can ask from the desk, and asking there takes nothing off one person standing at the front. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where nearness is stated as His position and no room is described as closer than another, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the layout of a hall, who carries what a man asks.

And if these eleven years have cost more than the people at that table know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has begun to weigh on you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.