I Read Past My Own Name

There is a way of reading that your eyes learn to do, and nobody taught it to you, and you have never noticed it happening.

You skip.

Not whole verses. Nothing so obvious. You read the whole thing, every word, and your eyes travel over the line with your own name in it at exactly the same speed they travel over everything else, and it does not land, and you turn the page.

She has read that promise, by her own reckoning, several hundred times. She has heard it preached from at least a dozen platforms. She has a Bible with the passage underlined in two colors from two different decades of her life.

And when she says the promise out loud from memory, she says it in a particular way, and she has never heard herself do it.

She says: your sons and your daughters will prophesy.

And her voice does something on the second half. It speeds up very slightly. It flattens. It is the voice you use for the part of a sentence that is context, the run-up, the words you get through on the way to the point.

Her name is in the second half. It has been in the second half since about seven hundred years before Christ, and she has been getting through it on the way to the point for thirty years.

So let me ask you, and I want you to answer it about the actual text you actually read.

Which half of that verse do your eyes skip every time?

Moses wished it on the whole camp

Long before Joel wrote the promise, and much longer before Peter quoted it in the street, there was a scene in a camp in the desert that I want to lay beside it, because the two of them together are the argument.

The Spirit had come on seventy elders and they had prophesied. And two men who had not gone to the tent, who were still back in the camp, had it come on them as well, and somebody ran to Moses to report it as a problem, and Joshua asked Moses to stop them.

And Moses said this.

Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit on them!Numbers 11:29

Now slow down on the second half, which is exactly where your eyes speed up. You have a name in that clause and the Holy Spirit put it there, and reading past a thing has never removed it from the page.

Hold on to what that is. It is a wish. Moses is not making a promise, because he cannot; he is an old man in a tent expressing something he wants and does not have the authority to grant.

All the Lord's people. Not the seventy. Not the qualified. All of them, the whole camp, the ones who did not come to the tent and the two who were left behind and everybody's daughters and everybody's servants.

And then, centuries later, God says it as a promise. The wish of an old man in a desert turns up in Joel as a thing God intends to do, and turns up again in Acts as a thing God has done, and every time it appears the list gets read out loud so that nobody can quietly be omitted.

Now hear what is true about you, and do not let your eyes speed up.

You are not the context of that sentence. Scripture puts sons and daughters in the same clause with the same verb, and the Holy Spirit has not once distributed by half.

And here is the precision that matters, because I teach and I am not going to be vague where the text is exact.

The skip is not modesty. Modesty is a way of carrying something you have. What you have been doing is declining delivery, which is a different act entirely, and it looks so much like modesty that nobody has ever challenged it, including you.

The word says the promise was for all of them and Moses wished it before God promised it. There is nothing in that text for you to be modest about, because nothing in it is a compliment. It is an announcement.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, and among the people it fell on were women who cleaned other people's houses six days a week and had never once been asked their opinion about anything. Nobody in that room had been consulted about whether they were suitable.

He fell on the room. And the room was full of people who had spent their whole lives reading past their own names.

So you are not being asked to feel worthy of that clause. Numbers 11 says Moses wished the Spirit on all the Lord's people, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has never once waited for a woman to agree with a promise before He kept it.