Nobody Sat Down Until He Came

Shanice has been fine about it for about twenty-five years.

That is the accurate way to say it. She is not bitter, she does not sulk, and if you brought any single instance up she would tell you honestly that it was not a big deal and that the person they picked was good.

There is just a very long list.

Teams at school, where she was picked but never early. A trip in sixth form. A job she did not apply for in the end because she could tell. A promotion that went sideways twice, both times to somebody perfectly decent. A group of four women who have been friends for nine years, and she is in it, absolutely she is in it, and she is the one they text when they need something rather than when they are booking something.

None of it is a scandal. That is the whole problem. Every single item on the list is small enough to be fine about, and she has been fine about all of them, one at a time, for twenty-five years.

And underneath, without a decision ever being made, she has built an entire self around the sentence: I am not the one people think of.

It came up over something ridiculous.

Work announced a group of four to go and do something. Nothing glamorous, a three-day thing, and it was not a promotion and there was no money in it.

She was not on it.

And she was fine, and she said congratulations to two of them, and she went and made a cup of tea.

And a woman she barely knows, from another floor, said, "That is mad. You are the obvious one for that."

And Shanice said something light and went out to the stairwell and cried for four minutes, which she has not done at work in her life.

She knew, standing there, that it was not about the three-day thing.

It was that somebody had looked at a list and expected to find her name on it, and that has not happened to her in so long that she did not have a defense ready.

Now let me ask you when you decided you were fine about it.

Because if this is yours you did decide, at some age, probably young, and it was a sensible decision at the time and it has cost you a great deal since, and the price is not that you are sad. The price is that you have stopped expecting to be thought of at all, including by God.

The room that stayed on its feet

There is a scene in First Samuel that turns on one sentence, and the sentence is about furniture.

Samuel comes to Bethlehem to anoint a king, and Jesse brings out his sons. Seven of them, one after another, and every one of them is a serious candidate and the eldest is so impressive that Samuel nearly moves on him.

And God says no to all seven.

Let me be careful here, because that is easy to read cruelly and it is not what is happening. Nothing in that chapter says those seven men were rejected by God as people. They were not chosen for a job. That is the whole of it, and the passage is not a comment on their souls and I am not going to let it become one.

But look at what is missing from the room.

There is an eighth son and nobody sent for him. He is not late and he did not miss the invitation. His own father, filling a house with his sons for the most important visit of that family's life, did not think of him.

And Samuel said to Jesse, "Are these all the children?" And he said, "There remains yet the youngest, and behold, he is tending the sheep." Then Samuel said to Jesse, "Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here."1 Samuel 16:11

We will not sit down until he comes here.

Sit with the picture. A prophet, a father, seven grown men, in a house, standing. Somebody has to run out to a field. That takes time, and the boy has to be found, and he has to walk back, and the whole time nobody in that room sits down.

He did not know. He was doing his job in a field with animals, and a house he had been left out of was standing up waiting for him.

So hear this said over you, in a stairwell at work with four minutes of something you did not expect. You have been thought of, specifically and by name, by the only one whose list decides anything, and He was thinking of you before your family, your school and your workplace had a list to leave you off. That is written into a house that would not sit down, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, and He does that work in the person nobody sent for.

Now let me be careful about what I am not promising you.

I am not telling you that you are about to get picked for things.

I do not know that. Nobody does, and if I finished this article by hinting that God is going to fix your workplace I would be selling you a comfort that is not mine to sell, and in eleven months you would have one more thing to be fine about.

What I am telling you is what has already happened, which is settled and is not waiting on anybody's list.

Before the foundation of the world, He chose. That is the language Ephesians uses, and read what it does to the sequence: the choosing about you was made before there was a school, a workplace, a friendship group, or a father who forgot to call you in from a field. It is upstream of every list you have ever not been on.

And here is the thing about your twenty-five years of being fine.

Being fine was a skill and you learned it because you had to, and it has protected you, and I am not going to ask you to take it off and stand there raw.

But look what it did quietly. You stopped expecting to be thought of. And a person who has stopped expecting to be thought of does not knock on God's door either, and reads every ordinary silence as confirmation, and never once puts herself forward for anything.

You have been living as though God works from the same list everybody else uses.

He does not. The whole point of the story is that the list in the room and the choice being made were two different documents, and the boy in the field was on the second one the entire time.

The word says He knew you before He formed you, and the Spirit of God is the one who cries Abba, Father in a person, which is the cry of somebody who is not standing outside wondering whether they are welcome.