Chosen For What I Can Do

She has been chosen for a great many things and she is very clear about why.

The choir at eleven, because of the voice. The debating team at fifteen, because of the voice again, differently. Head of a department at twenty nine, because she is the one who finishes things. Four boards. Two committees she did not want. A trustee position she was talked into on a Tuesday by a man who told her, quite honestly, that they needed somebody who could read a set of accounts and say the hard thing in a meeting.

She is fifty three.

She has never once been chosen for herself.

She would want that examined rather than pitied, so examine it. Every single selection in her life has had a reason attached, and every reason has been a capability, and she has never resented one of them. She is good at things. It is reasonable that people want the things she is good at. She would choose the same way if she were running any of those rooms.

But there is a difference between being selected and being wanted, and a woman who has only ever been selected knows exactly where the seam is.

It shows up in an odd place. It shows up when there is nothing to do.

Put her in a kitchen where the cooking is already handled and there is a stool and somebody says sit down, and she cannot. Not physically. Something in her starts scanning for a job within about eleven seconds, and if there is genuinely no job she starts feeling the thing she has never had a word for, which is not boredom and is not awkwardness.

It is the feeling of having no reason to be in the room.

And underneath all of it, unexamined since she was about nine, is a rule she has never said out loud: that a person is in a room because of what they bring, and that a person who brings nothing has no grounds to be there.

She has carried that rule to God, obviously. She serves in four places.

You know the rule. Yours may have been learned somewhere else. But you know what it is to be chosen often, honestly, and for something, and to have quietly concluded that the something is the ticket, and to have never once tested what happens when you have nothing in your hands.

Gathered is not assembled

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about resting from work you will file it with the others and do nothing, and you have read that article four times.

You are gathered and not selected, and you were wanted before anything had been brought. Matthew 23:37 chooses chicks under a wing, who carry nothing, and names the wanting over a city with a bad record, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that in.

The pit is not overwork. You are not tired in the way that article assumes.

The pit is a rule about grounds. You believe, at a level you have never inspected, that presence has to be earned by contribution, and so the whole language of being wanted has never had anywhere to land in you, and God has been quietly filed under the same rule as every board you have ever sat on.

Here is the verse.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!Matthew 23:37

Look at the picture He chose, because He could have chosen anything.

A hen gathering chicks under her wings.

Chicks do not bring anything. That is not a poetic flourish, it is the whole reason the picture works. There is no capability in a chick that makes gathering it worthwhile, no contribution, nothing to read in a meeting. A hen does not assemble the useful ones.

And notice what He says about the city He is looking at. He has just described it, in the same sentence, as the place that kills the prophets and stones the ones sent to it.

That is what the wanting is aimed at. Not at merit. He names the record and states the desire in the same breath, and the desire is not conditional on the record improving.

Take that on the stool with nothing in your hands, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written. Gathering is not assembling, and He named what He wanted before anybody had brought Him anything. Matthew 23:37 puts the wanting first and the record second, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a sentence like that past a rule learned at nine, and He is not selecting for a department.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The hen and her chicks is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.

You are gathered and not selected, and you were wanted before anything had been brought. Matthew 23:37 chooses a hen and her chicks, who carry nothing at all, and says the wanting over a city with a bad record, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that past a rule learned at nine.

And the last clause stands: and ye would not. There is grief in this verse and I am not sanding it off. He wanted, and they did not come, and He said so with the loss in His voice. That is not a lever and I am not going to use it as one. It is simply the evidence that the wanting was real, because nobody grieves over a selection process.