Nine Of My Staff Sit In That Room

She knows where all nine of them sit, and she does not have to look.

Two are near the back on the left. One is three rows in front of her with his family. The rest are scattered, and she could draw you a map, and the map is one of the first things her mind does when she walks in.

They are her staff. She hires, she reviews, she has had to let two people go in four years, and on Monday morning she runs a meeting they all sit in. On Sunday morning they are simply people in a room, and she is glad about that and she would defend it.

But when the invitation comes, she does not move, and the reason is very precise. It is not pride. It is that if she stands up and walks to the front, her face will do something she cannot control, in front of nine people she has to be steady in front of on Monday, and she cannot take that back once it has been seen.

So she stays in her seat, and she has stayed in her seat for four years, and the staying has hardened into a rule she never wrote.

If the room you worship in is also a room that knows you professionally, come in and sit down. Nothing about the front, or about one person who has walked to it, is going to be run down here.

The fear is not vanity and it is not going to be scolded

Let us be accurate about what she is afraid of, because a page that misnames it will not help her.

She is not afraid of looking foolish. She is afraid of a real thing: that authority is partly composure, that composure once broken in front of the people you lead is genuinely hard to rebuild, and that Monday is a working day with consequences in it.

That is not vanity. It is an accurate reading of a workplace, and nobody is going to tell her here that she should not care about it.

What is not accurate is the second half, the part she added without noticing: that because she cannot break in front of them, she therefore cannot ask at all. Those are two different things, and somewhere in four years the first one swallowed the second.

You have not been shut out of what God does in that building. Nothing about nine people who report to you has ever set the terms of your access to Him. I am not saying that to talk her out of a real risk. The written word says they looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed (Psalm 34:5), which puts the looking and the face in the same sentence and settles what happens to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a woman who runs a Monday meeting.

What He does with a face

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it questions nothing about anybody who goes forward.

Read what the verse actually reports about the people who looked, because it is oddly specific about their faces.

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.Psalm 34:5

Their faces were not ashamed. The psalm goes straight to the thing she is protecting. Not their hearts, not their standing, their faces, which is exactly the currency she is worried about spending.

And the direction of the looking matters. They looked unto him. That is not a walk to a location. It is where the eyes go, and it can be done from row nine without one person beside her knowing it happened.

You can look to Him without anybody in that room seeing it, and Scripture reports that what comes back is light rather than shame. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a woman who can draw a map of her own congregation.

Nothing here is against the ones who go up

Something has to be said very plainly, or this becomes a dignified excuse instead of a truth.

The people who stand up and walk to the front are not doing something unnecessary. It costs several of them their composure in front of people who know them too, and they do it anyway, and what happens up there is real. If a Sunday comes when you can go, go, and this page will not put one thing in your way.

The relief is not that the front is for people with less to lose.

You can ask from that seat, 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, to all that call upon him in truth (Psalm 145:18), where the condition is truth rather than visibility, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not who is watching, who carries what a woman asks.

And if these four years have cost more than anybody in that front room knows, if sleep has gone, if Monday has 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.