They Want The Office

He asked himself a question in the car in September and he has not been able to unask it.

If I stepped down on Friday, who is still here on Monday?

He is fifty five and he has held the same office for twenty years, and he is good at it, and he has never once used it badly, and that is worth saying because there is a version of this man who has and this is not him.

The question is not bitter. He would push back if you called it that. He is not a man collecting grievances and he could name forty people this week who have been kind to him.

It is that after twenty years he can no longer perform the separation.

Every relationship he has runs through the office in some way. The people he sees most are the ones he works with. The people who ring him ring him about something. The invitations come to the office and are addressed to it, and even the warm ones, the genuinely warm ones from people who love him, arrive shaped by what he does.

He does not doubt that people are fond of him. He doubts that anybody has ever had the opportunity to want him, because there has been no version of him available for twenty years that was not carrying the office in with him.

There was a moment in a front room in September with four friends in it, which is where the car question came from. Somebody said something completely ordinary, that they were glad he had come, and he found himself doing an assessment while smiling and nodding. Would they be glad if I were not what I am.

He could not answer it and he could not stop asking it, and he drove home doing the arithmetic on four decent people who had done nothing wrong.

You know the question. Yours may attach to something other than an office. But you know what it is to be so thoroughly identified with a function that you have lost the ability to detect whether anybody is there for you, and to be unable to test it without blowing up your life.

He wanted a city that was stoning Him

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about identity and role you will recognize the shape of it and stop reading, and you have probably taught it.

The pit is that the question you are asking is unanswerable by design, and you have been trying to answer it for a year. You cannot run the experiment. You cannot remove the office to see what is left, because the removal itself would change every variable, and so you are stuck with a question that has real weight and no possible evidence.

A man in that position needs a sentence from somewhere the office cannot reach.

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 who He is wanting, because that is the whole of it for you.

He is not looking at a city that has been useful to Him. He describes it, in the same breath as the wanting, as the place that kills the prophets and stones the ones sent to it.

That is a city with nothing to offer. Not a supporter, not a platform, not a function He needs performing. It has actively harmed the people He sent, and He says out loud that He has wanted, again and again, to gather it.

There is no office anywhere in that sentence. Nothing is being wanted for what it can do.

And then, and I am not going to sand this off: and ye would not.

They did not come. The wanting was real, it was stated, and it was refused, and He grieved it out loud in public. That is why this verse can be trusted by a man who suspects everything warm that comes toward him. Nobody performs grief over a functionary.

Take that in the chair, and know it is not me reassuring a tired man, it is what is written. He wanted a city that was stoning Him, which is a wanting aimed at nothing useful at all. Matthew 23:37 puts the desire in the first person and the record right beside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a word past twenty years of everything arriving through an office, and He is not writing to the office.

You are wanted where the office cannot reach, and you were wanted by somebody who was getting nothing out of it. Matthew 23:37 names the desire over a city that was killing the ones He sent, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a word like that, and He did not come in through the role.

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.