She Keeps Passing Them On To Somebody Better

She is the person people ask. That has been true for about six years and she is not sure how it started.

It happens in the ten minutes after things, and by message, and twice it has happened in a supermarket. Somebody has a real question and she is the one they bring it to.

And she almost always knows the answer.

That is what makes her habit so strange when she looks at it directly, which she did for the first time about a month ago. She knows the answer, and she gives about forty percent of it, and then she says: you should really talk to somebody about this properly, and she names one of two people.

Both of those people are excellent and she means every word of the recommendation.

She has never counted how many went.

She started thinking about it after a woman said something in passing, months later, about how she had never got round to it, and it had been a hard year, and the way she said it made something turn over in her.

So she went back through the ones she could remember.

She can identify eleven people over six years that she has handed on. She knows for certain that two of them went. She knows for certain that four did not, because they have said so or because she has seen enough to know.

The other five she has no idea about, and it is the five she thinks about at night.

And what she cannot work out is why she does it. She is not lazy and she is not frightened of the conversations. She has stood in front of rooms.

What she thinks, when she is honest, is that she believes those people deserve a better answer than hers. That is genuinely the shape of it: a kind of respect for the person asking, which has been quietly functioning as a door for six years.

And you do this. Somebody brings you something real and you give them part of an answer and a name, and you have never once counted how many of them followed it up.

God chose what is low, and He is explicit about why

There is a passage in First Corinthians which lists God's selection criteria, and every item on the list is the opposite of what you have been applying.

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.1 Corinthians 1:27-28

Foolish, weak, low, despised, and then things that are not, which is a startling phrase that essentially means nobodies.

And the reason is given in the next verse: so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

That is not a consolation for people who have nothing. It is the stated method, chosen deliberately, so that when something happens it is unmistakable where it came from.

You are exactly the sort of instrument that list describes, and the list is a preference rather than a concession. It is written that God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who works through the person actually in the room, which is what makes the arrangement work at all.

Now the respect that has been functioning as a door.

You believe people deserve a better answer than yours. That comes from a good place and it is the reason this has never felt like avoidance, and it is worth examining what it assumes.

It assumes that the best available answer is the most complete one. But a person who has brought you a real question in the ten minutes after something is not conducting research. They are asking somebody they trust, in a moment when the question is live, and the value of what they get is partly the completeness and largely the fact that it came from you, then, while they were still able to ask it.

You have been optimizing for completeness in a situation where availability was the thing that mattered. Scripture says a word in season, how good it is (Proverbs 15:23), and season is a word about timing rather than quality, and it is the Holy Spirit who arranges the ten minutes after things, which is where almost all of this actually happens.

And the four you know did not go.

That is the part that turned over in you and it should. Not as guilt, because you did nothing wrong and you gave a good recommendation to good people in good faith.

But it is data, and you have been running this system for six years without ever looking at the output. Four out of the eleven you can account for did not go anywhere, and they had a real question at a live moment and what they left with was forty percent of an answer and a name.

You have been sending people to a door that most of them do not walk through, and now you know it. It is written that the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few (Matthew 9:37), and it is His Spirit who puts a person in front of somebody at the exact moment they can ask, which is a placement rather than an accident.

And the five you think about at night.

You will probably never know about those five. That is real and this page is not going to pretend otherwise or tell you they are all fine.

You are not carrying responsibility for five outcomes and you never were. Scripture says I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at work in all eleven of those people whether or not any of them took a name, which is the only reason a person in your position can sleep.