You Are Not the First to Notice

Rami has been asking himself what is wrong with him since about the middle of March.

Not about a wrong that was done to him. That would be easier. About something he noticed, which nobody else in the room appeared to notice, and about which he has said precisely nothing.

The business is his uncle's, more or less. It is not, on paper. On paper there are four of them, and there are meetings, and there is a form of words used at those meetings that sounds like consultation.

What actually happens is that Nabil decides, and then the meeting happens, and the meeting is where everybody hears what has been decided and says that it sounds good.

Rami has been in that room for six years. He has watched it perhaps two hundred times and never once thought about it as a shape, because it is simply how it has always been and because Nabil is not a bad man. That is important and it is the reason this took eleven years to become a question at all. Nabil is generous, he is fair with the money, he took Rami's mother in for two years without a word to anybody, and he works harder than any of them.

Then in March there was a decision about the second unit.

And Rami, sitting there, had a thought arrive that he had never had before, and it was this: nobody asked any of us, and nobody is going to, and if this is wrong there is nothing in this room that will catch it.

And then, immediately, before the thought had even finished, came the second thought, and it is the second thought that has cost him five months.

What is wrong with me that I am thinking this.

That is where he has lived since March. Not in the first thought, which he has barely revisited. In the second one. He has examined himself for ingratitude, for pride, for wanting his uncle's chair, for being the kind of young man who complains. He has been over the whole of his own motives at some length and found several things he did not like, because anybody who searches themselves that hard finds something.

He said one sentence about it to his uncle Salim, who is not in the business, on a step, in July.

He said, "I think I have got a problem with authority."

And Salim laughed, which was not what Rami expected, and then apologized for laughing, and then said:

"Habibi. You are not the first person to notice. There have been six of you." He counted three of them on his fingers, all of whom Rami knew. "You are the first one who decided there was something wrong with him for it."

Now let me ask you where yours is.

It might be a business, a family, a committee, a department, a club, a house. Somewhere a decision arrives finished, and there is no route by which anybody could have questioned it, and you noticed that once and have been examining yourself about it ever since.

The idea of sharing it was God's

There is a scene in Exodus that people read as a management story and it is not, because of who says it and what happens next.

Moses is judging every dispute in the nation personally, from morning until evening, and his father-in-law watches for one day and tells him it is not good, and then tells him what to do about it.

Furthermore, you shall select out of all the people able men who fear God, men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain; and you shall place these over them as leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens. Let them judge the people at all times.Exodus 18:21 to 22

Thousands, hundreds, fifties, tens. Four layers, and it is worth noticing that the smallest is ten. Somebody accountable for a very small number of people, close enough to know them, and answerable upward.

And here is the part that matters most for a man who has been examining himself since March: Moses does it. The one person in that book who could most credibly have claimed a direct line to God, who had actually been up the mountain, who had every reason to say that his own judgment was sufficient, listens to his father-in-law and shares it out.

So hear this said over you, on the step in July. Your instinct that authority ought to answer to something did not come from a bad heart, it came from the way God arranged His own people, and you have spent five months prosecuting yourself for agreeing with Exodus 18. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who convicts a person of what is actually wrong with them, which means five months of finding nothing conclusive was not Him being slow.

Now let me be extremely clear about what this article is not doing, because this is the exact point where a message like this does damage.

This is not telling you to confront anybody.

Not your uncle, not the chair, not the person whose name is on nothing. There is no instruction here to raise it, to organize, to say something at the next meeting, or to go and find the other five. This article does not know your situation, it does not know what it would cost you or what it would cost your family, and a real person will act on what a page like this says.

And it is not telling you that anybody has failed. Nabil is not a villain in this. Most of the people who end up deciding alone did not seize anything; they were left holding it, often for years, and no one ever built anything around them. That is a description of a great many good people and it is not an accusation.

What this article is for is one thing, and it is the thing nobody has said to you.

You are not rebellious for noticing.

That is all. That is the whole of it, and it is worth five months of your life back.

Because look at what those months have actually contained. You have been running an investigation into your own heart on the strength of a thought that was simply true. And Scripture says the heart is deceitful and it says search me and know my heart, and both of those are good and right, and neither of them means that a plain observation about a room is evidence of pride.

You are able to notice a thing without it being sin, and that ability is part of how God made you, and He is the one who put a shared structure into His own people in the first place. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates real conviction from a general sense of being in the wrong, and He does that in His own way and rarely on the schedule of a person who is searching hard.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose whole distinctive was this: not that leaders are bad, but that leadership should sit in a group rather than in a person, and that every one of them should answer to something above himself. Their word for the arrangement was ordinary and unromantic. They were not trying to be radical. They thought they were tidying something back to its original shape.

They also, and this matters, built it so that a young man in a room would never have to become a rebel in order to ask a question. The point of the structure was that noticing would not have to cost anybody anything.

You have been paying a cost that the arrangement was designed to remove.