Eleven Years Of Leading It

Eleven years.

He can tell you the attendance figures for any month you name. He knows what the heating costs. He has done four hundred and something of these and he is not tired of them and I want that understood, because the story people expect here is burnout and this is not that.

He loves it. He would do it for nothing and for two of those years he did.

Ask him when he last received anything in that room and he will go quiet, and then he will say something honest, which is that he does not know how he would tell.

Because he is working. All the way through. Not performing, and not distracted in the ordinary sense, but running a room: aware of the sound, of the woman near the back who came in upset, of whether the thing at 11:15 is going to overrun, of the man who always needs a word afterwards.

Eleven years of that attention, every week, for ninety minutes.

He has not been dry, exactly. Something is going on in him; he reads, he prays, he has an interior life and it is not empty.

But he cannot remember the last time anything happened to him in the room he is responsible for, and lately, on a Thursday, that thought has started arriving on its own without being sent for.

So let me ask you.

When did you last receive anything in the room you are responsible for?

Paul put both halves in one sentence and left them there

There is a verse in Second Corinthians that gets used as a comfort and it is more useful than that, because of the way it is built.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Two clauses, joined, both present tense, both about the same person at the same time.

Now, we usually read that as body and soul, and that is a fair reading. But notice what Paul does not do with it.

He does not resolve it. He does not say the inward renewal cancels the outward wasting, or that the wasting is imaginary, or that a properly spiritual man would not notice it. Both things are true simultaneously and they stay true, in one sentence, unreconciled, for the rest of the letter.

That is worth an enormous amount to a man who is running a room.

Because you have been trying to resolve yours. You have assumed that if the inward were right you would feel it in the room, and that not feeling it in the room means something has gone wrong inwardly, and Paul's sentence says those two can run independently for a long time without either of them being a lie.

Hear where you stand, eleven years in.

You are not a man who has gone dry. Scripture puts wasting and renewing in the same clause without resolving them, and the Holy Spirit has not made a person's experience in a room the measure of what He is doing in them.

And now let me say the thing I actually want to say to you, and I say it as somebody who has stood where you stand.

The reason you cannot find yourself in that room is not spiritual. It is attentional.

You are running it. A man who is monitoring a sound desk and a nervous woman at the back and a clock cannot also be a man with his eyes shut, and that is not a failure of devotion, it is how attention works. Nobody can face two directions.

For eleven years you have been the one facing the room. And the room has been fed, week after week, and you are not wrong to have done it.

The word says we are being renewed day by day, and day by day is the phrase that gives it away: renewal in that sentence has nothing to do with an event in a service.

But you are not a man who has gone dry. 2 Corinthians 4 sets the wasting and the renewing side by side in one clause and never lets either of them cancel the other, and the Holy Spirit never made anybody's experience in a meeting the measure of what He is doing in them.