When Are You Going To Do Something With It

It comes at every gathering, usually about an hour in, usually from a different person each time so that nobody feels they are pressing.

When are you going to do something with it.

They love him. That has to be said before anything else, because it is the whole difficulty. This is not a family that undermines its own. They are proud of him, they say so in front of other people, and the question is a form of that pride wearing the only clothes it has.

He has tried about nine answers over six years. He has tried humor. He has tried explaining that he does do something with it, most weeks, for individual people who would rather not be discussed at a table. He has tried the vague one, which buys a year. He has tried honesty, once, and it landed like a disappointment and he has not tried it again.

And underneath all nine, the thing he cannot get past: a small, patient dread that they might be right. That a thing not being built into anything is a thing being wasted, and that six years of ordinary quiet obedience is what wasting looks like from the outside.

If your family keeps asking, come and sit under the vines. Not one of them is going to be criticized here.

The question assumes an appointment he never received

Let us look at what the question quietly takes for granted, because everybody at that table is assuming it and nobody has ever said it.

It assumes that a gift is raw material and that the recipient is the manufacturer. That God supplies the capacity and the person supplies the enterprise, and that a capacity left unbuilt is a capacity left on a shelf.

That is not how any of this is described. In the account, the sending and the appointing are done by the one who gives, not by the one who receives, and a man who has not been sent anywhere is not a man who has failed to organize himself.

You are not wasting it. Nothing about a gift with no enterprise attached has ever put it on a shelf. I am not saying that to get a man out of an obligation. Scripture says ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit (John 15:16), which puts the choosing and the ordaining on His side of the exchange, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man an hour into a family lunch.

The choosing runs the other way

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off a single person at that table.

Read the direction of the verbs, because the whole sentence is built to correct an assumption.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.John 15:16

Ye have not chosen me. He states the negative first, deliberately, before he says anything else, which means the mistake being corrected is exactly the one that table is making.

And ordained you. The commissioning is His act, in the past tense, done. A man who has not been dispatched into a public work has not been overlooked and has not been slow. He has been ordained to whatever the fruit is, and the fruit is not specified as a structure.

You were chosen and ordained by Him rather than assembled by yourself, and Scripture corrects the direction before it says anything else. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man refilling glasses down a table.

Nobody at that table is being blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about a family whose only fault is pride in their own.

They ask because they love him, and because in the world they know a thing that matters gets built, and that is not shallow, it is how people have always honored something. Nobody at that table wants him famous. They want the thing that is plainly in him to be given room, and they do not have a category for room that is invisible.

And nothing here is against anybody who has built something. The people with names and structures are not less genuine than he is, and several of them were dispatched precisely as he has not been.

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 profit is of people rather than of an enterprise, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a family's honest hope at a lunch, who does the sending.

And if these six years have cost more than the people under those vines know, if sleep has gone, if the gatherings 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.