The Youngest One In The Room

She is nineteen, and the next youngest person in that room is about forty two, and she has counted.

Nobody has ever said anything about it. They are pleased she comes. Two of the women make a point of asking about her course and remember the answers, and an older man once told her, in passing and without ceremony, that having her there changed the room.

That last remark is the one that undid her. She has thought about it perhaps four hundred times since.

Because what she took from it, and she is not sure it was in it, is that she is there as a sample. That every week she is quietly answering a question the room is asking about her whole generation: whether the young ones still have any of this, whether it survives into the next lot, whether the thing they have carried for thirty years has anywhere to go.

So she arrives now with a job. Not stated, not assigned, entirely her own, and enormous. And what came to her, which was real and which she has never doubted, has gradually turned into her material.

If you are the youngest one in the room, get a cup and sit down. Nobody in that room is going to be criticized here, and neither is anything they do.

Nobody put her on that stand

Let us look at where the job came from, because that is the whole of it and it is not where she thinks.

She built it. Out of one warm remark, out of being conspicuous, out of being nineteen and decent and wanting the people who fed her to be glad they had. It is made of good material, and it is entirely her own construction, and no one in that building has ever asked her for a single thing.

But once a person believes they are representative, everything they do becomes evidence, and evidence is performed whether or not the performer means to. She has not had an unwatched hour in that room in two years, and the watcher is her.

You are not on trial in there. Nothing about being the youngest has ever made you the answer to a question about anybody's generation. I am not saying it to take the weight off a nineteen year old. Scripture says do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men (Galatians 1:10), which is a man checking who his audience actually is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a girl counting ages across a room.

The question about the audience

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that room.

Read what Paul does with the question, because he does not answer it with an argument. He answers it by naming who is watching.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.Galatians 1:10

Two audiences, named, and treated as mutually exclusive at the point of motive. He does not say the men are bad, or that their opinion is worthless, or that they should be ignored. He says that whoever a person is working for is the one they belong to.

And note the way he asks it. As a question to himself, in the middle of a letter, the way a person checks a thing they might have drifted on.

You may check who you have been working for, and Scripture treats that as an ordinary question rather than an accusation. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a girl of nineteen with a cup in her hand.

This is our failure, not yours

Something must be said plainly here, and it is about us rather than about her.

The performance trap is not a young believer's sin. It is the family failure of everybody who has ever been in a room like that one, at every age, and most of the people around her have their own version of it and have had it for decades. If she caught it, she caught it from a room full of carriers, and there is no version of this page in which a nineteen year old is the one being told off.

And nothing here is against the way anybody in that room worships. What is expressive there is not showing off, the ones who are demonstrative are not less real than the ones who are not, and a quiet person is not further along than a loud one.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the purpose is profit rather than display, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a nineteen year old, who is responsible for what a generation does with any of it.

And if this has cost more than the people at that urn know, if sleep has gone, if the midweek 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.