Last Picked, Forty Years Running

There were two captains and about twenty two boys and he was nine years old.

You know how it goes because it went the same way everywhere. Names get called, the line gets shorter, and there is a point past which the calling is no longer about wanting anybody and is only about the fact that the remaining bodies have to be distributed.

He was past that point. Not once. Every time, for two years, in a yard with a painted line on it.

And on a Tuesday in the second year, standing at the end with two others, he made a decision. It was fully formed and he can still hear it. He decided that nobody was ever going to do that to him again, and that the way to make sure was simple, which is that he would never again be in a position where somebody could choose him.

He is forty nine.

He has kept it.

He would not describe his life that way and neither would anybody who knows him, because it does not look like withdrawal. It looks like competence.

He is the one who organizes. He runs the thing, he books the room, he makes the list, he brings the food. In every group he has been in since he was fifteen, he has ended up holding something, and the holding is what he arranged so that the question of whether anybody wants him there never comes up.

You cannot be left at the end of the line if you are the one holding the ball.

And it has worked. It has worked for forty years, which is the problem with a good strategy: nothing ever proves it wrong.

It surfaced once. His sister said something at a table in the courtyard last summer, lightly, not knowing what she had hold of. She said: you never just come, do you.

And he laughed and said something and moved the plates, and that was the end of it, and he thought about it for a week.

You know the decision. Yours may have been made at a different age in a different yard. But you know what it is to have taken yourself off the market at some point so early that you no longer experience it as a decision, and to have called the arrangement by a better name ever since.

He said it first and out loud

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about the boy in the yard, we will both have a feeling and nothing will move.

The pit is not the memory. The pit is the strategy you built on it, which is still running today, which is excellent, and which has one flaw that is the whole point.

It makes it structurally impossible for you to ever find out that somebody wanted you.

If you are always the one holding the ball, then every group you are in is a group you cannot be picked into, and forty years of never being left at the end of the line have also been forty years of never once being called. The strategy protects you from the wound by removing the only thing that could heal it.

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

Read the order of it, because the order is everything for you.

He speaks first.

Nobody came to Him and asked. Nobody put themselves forward and got a favorable answer. He stood over a city and said out loud, unprompted, what He had wanted, and the wanting had been there long before anybody knew about it: how often would I have gathered.

And then read the last clause, which I am not going to sand off. And ye would not.

They did not come. He said it anyway. He said what He wanted about people who had already refused, in public, with the loss audible in it.

That clause is the reason this verse can reach a man who has spent forty years making sure nobody gets a vote on him. It proves the wanting was not produced by anybody's response, because there was no response. It was His, first, out loud, and it survived being turned down.

Take that at the table, and know it is not my sympathy, it is what is written. He said what He wanted first and out loud, and He said it over people who did not come. Matthew 23:37 puts the wanting before the answer and the grief after it, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a sentence like that inside a strategy forty years old, and He is not waiting to be volunteered for.

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.