I Wound It Down And Now I Have Nothing To Say

It had a name for eleven years, and the name is gone, and the strange part is how much smaller that has made him at parties.

He wound it down on purpose. It was not a scandal and it was not a collapse. It had done what it was for, the people it had gathered were mostly settled elsewhere, the accounts were closed properly and the last thing anybody said in that room was thank you. He would do it again.

What he did not anticipate is the question. Somebody asks what he does, in a kitchen, with a mug in their hand, entirely pleasantly, and there is a two second gap where an answer used to live.

He fills it now with his job, which is true and which nobody expects to be the whole of him. And he watches the conversation move on, and he goes home fine, and then at some point in the evening the same thought arrives: that he used to be somebody's something, and is now a man who used to be.

Nothing has actually changed about what God did in him. He knows that. He can say the sentence. He simply cannot get it to reach the place where the two second gap is.

If you closed something good, come and get a mug. Nothing you built and nothing anybody else is running is going to be criticized here.

The name was doing a second job

Let us look at what the name was carrying, because it was doing more than labeling a work and he did not know it until it went.

It labeled the work. That was the honest job. But it was also, quietly, answering a question about him: who he was, why he was in a room, what the shape of his life was. It answered that question every single time, for eleven years, without him having to.

When the work closed, both jobs ended at once. The work ending was right and expected. The other one was never noticed until the gap appeared, and now there is a question arriving in kitchens that he has not had to answer personally since he was thirty one.

You have not become a former person. Nothing about a name coming off a door has ever taken anything off you. I am not saying it to comfort a man at a party. Scripture says notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven (Luke 10:20), which redirects the joy off the work and onto a register kept elsewhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man with a mug in his hand.

Redirected off the work, and onto a register

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody running anything.

Read when He says it, because the timing is the point and it is easy to miss.

Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.Luke 10:20

He says it to seventy men who have just come back from the most successful thing they had ever done. They are elated, and their elation is not corrected as pride. What is corrected is where it is resting.

And notice what He puts in its place: your names are written in heaven. A name, on a register, in a location neither they nor anybody else can wind down. He hands them a name at the exact moment their work is at its height, as though He could see the day it would end.

You have a name written somewhere no closure can reach, and Scripture hands it over at the peak of the work rather than after it. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man in a kitchen at forty something.

Nothing here is against what you built or what others run

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page suggesting that having a name was the mistake.

It was not. Those eleven years were real, the name was honest, and the people who were gathered and settled were gathered and settled by actual work that somebody had to organize. Winding it down does not retrospectively make it vanity.

And the people still running things are not carrying an idol. Many of them will hand it on well, and a work with a name is not a lesser form of obedience than a work without one.

You do not need a platform for this to be real. It was given to you, not to an audience. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the giving is to the person rather than to the project, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the presence or absence of a name, who holds what was given.

And if this has cost more than the friends in that kitchen know, if sleep has gone, if the evenings after those conversations have started to frighten 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, and a man who used to lead something is not exempt from needing it.