The Woman Who Always Asks First

She is always there before the urn has boiled.

That is not an accident and it took her a long time to admit it.

If you are early, you are the one standing when people come in. And if you are standing when people come in, you get to say it first. How was the week. How is your mum. Did you get the results.

By the time anybody turns it round on her, she has been asking for twenty minutes and the room is full and somebody needs a chair, and she is off.

Four years, near enough, of a maneuver so smooth she stopped noticing she was doing it.

Then a fortnight ago a woman she has known for years caught her by the wrist, quite gently, halfway through her opening question, and said: no. You go first.

And she laughed. And she said something light. And the woman waited.

And she found, standing in a hall she has been in every Sunday of her adult life, that she genuinely did not know how to start.

She is not in trouble. That is the thing worth saying early. There is no crisis behind this, no secret, nothing awful being covered. She would tell you her life is good and she would mean it.

It is simply that at some point being the one who asks became a way of never being the one who is asked, and she cannot date it, and nobody in that room has any idea.

If you get your question in first, come and sit down with a cup. Nothing here is going to become a confession.

Stirring one another up assumes people who know something

There is a verse in Hebrews that everybody quotes about turning up and almost nobody reads properly.

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.Hebrews 10:24

The word behind consider is a thinking word. It means to fix your attention on something, to study it. So the instruction is: pay attention to one another closely enough that you can tell what would actually help this particular person.

That is not achievable at arm's length. You cannot consider how to stir up somebody you know nothing about. The verse quietly assumes people who have some real information about each other, and the information has to come from somewhere.

Which is where you have been standing, for four years, with your question ready.

You were made to be known as well as to know, and that is provision rather than exposure. Hebrews 10:24 assumes a mutual attention, and it is the Holy Spirit who binds people together into a body in the first place, so being asked is not a failure of your competence. It is the arrangement working in the direction it has never been allowed to run.

Nobody is asking you for a confession

Now let me take the real fear off the table, because it is not that you have something to hide.

You are afraid of the change in the room. That if you say a true thing, you go from being the one who holds the hall together to being a thing the hall has to hold. That people start being careful with you. That the tea and the chairs and the asking would still happen, and none of it would be yours any more.

Fair enough. So look at how small the actual ask is.

Not a group. Not an accountability arrangement, which this site does not hand anybody and I am not about to start. Not your interior laid out between the urn and the biscuits.

One person. One true sentence.

I have been tired in a way that sleep does not touch. Nobody has asked me anything in about four years and I set it up that way. I am fine, and I would still like one person to know how the spring went.

That is it. And notice what it does not do. It makes nobody responsible for you. It simply means a thing that lived only inside you now lives between two people, and from that moment there is somebody who could notice.

You have permission to be carried as well as to carry, and it costs you nothing you actually had. Galatians 6:2 says to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and the one another is doing all the work in that sentence, and it is the Spirit who binds a people together, which means a woman who lets one person in has not stopped being the one who holds the room.

And here is the ground it stands on. God is the one keeping you while you keep everybody else in tea. You are already known completely, and you were never actually unseen in that hall. Psalm 139:2 says He knows when you sit down and when you rise up, and it is His Spirit who has been in that room every Sunday, so nobody knowing is not the same as nobody watching.