The Third Name You Typed Tonight

Eleven at night, a search box, and the third name he has typed into it in twenty minutes.

The first two were taken. He was almost relieved, and then he typed a third, and it is available, and he has been looking at the word available for about four minutes now without doing anything about it.

He is not a man who wants to be famous. That has to be said, because the search box makes it look like that and it is not that at all.

What has actually happened is eighteen months of praying for people. One at a time, mostly on the phone, sometimes in a van, once in a hospital corridor at four in the morning. Nobody organized it. It started with a neighbor and it has gone on since, and he has never once mentioned it to anybody at his church.

And about two months ago a thought arrived that has not left: that a thing nobody knows about is a thing that has not really started. That eighteen months of this without a name on it is a rehearsal rather than a work.

So he is sitting at a kitchen table at eleven at night, looking at a word on a screen, trying to work out whether obedience requires a website.

If you have a search box open, shut the laptop and sit down. Nobody who has ever built anything is going to be criticized here.

The thought arrived from somewhere and it is not from the work

Let us look at the sentence that got him to the search box, because it is not a conclusion he reached by praying about it.

The sentence is: a thing nobody knows about has not really started. He did not derive that from eighteen months of doing the thing, which have been, by any honest account, the most fruitful eighteen months of his adult life. He absorbed it from the shape of the world around him, where a work is real once it is visible and a person is doing something once it can be described.

That is a way of counting, and it is not a bad one everywhere, and it produces an obviously false result when applied to a man who has prayed with somebody in a corridor at four in the morning.

You have already started. Nothing about eighteen months with no name on it has ever made it a rehearsal. I am not saying it to talk a man out of building something. The written word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the profit is of people and no structure is named, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a kitchen at eleven at night.

Profit of people, and nothing about a structure

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person who has built something.

Read what the verse names as the point and notice what it never mentions.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.1 Corinthians 12:7

To profit withal. The aim is the good of people, stated plainly, and reached one at a time in that chapter and everywhere near it.

And there is no organization anywhere in the sentence. No name, no audience, no vehicle, nothing that has to be constructed before the giving is real or before the purpose is being served. A man on the phone with a neighbor is inside that verse completely.

You are already inside the purpose that verse names, and Scripture attaches no structure to it at all. That is written into the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man with a search box open.

Nothing here is against anybody who built something

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page that quietly sneers at everybody with a name and a website.

They are not compromised. Somebody had to organize the thing that reached him when he was nineteen, and it had a name because it had to have a name for anybody to find it, and the people who do that work carry administration and money and disappointment that he has never had to touch.

And this page does not tell him not to register it. That is not a decision a page can make for a man at his own kitchen table, and if God tells him to build something, he should build it.

You do not need a platform for this to be real. It was given to you, not to an audience. Scripture says thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly (Matthew 6:4), where the seeing is already happening in the part nobody else can look at, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a domain name, who has been present in a van and a corridor for eighteen months.

And if these months have cost more than the friends in that kitchen know, if sleep has gone, if the eleven o'clock hour has become the worst of the day, 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 going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.