I Do Not Know Who To Tell

You wanted to tell somebody.

That is the true sentence and it is worth having it said plainly, because it has probably never been said, and because the thing that follows it in your head is a correction.

The correction goes something like: it is a shelf. Or it is a fence. Or it is a room, and rooms get finished all the time, and a man of fifty does not ring somebody up about a room.

So the wanting gets overruled, in about a second, and then there is nothing to do with it, and it sits there for a couple of days and goes quiet.

Here is what I want to put beside that. The wanting was not the ridiculous part.

The wanting is what a person has when something that was hard and long is over. It is the ordinary shape of a human being at the end of a thing. What is unusual is not that you wanted to tell somebody. What is unusual is that there is a rule in your head about what size a thing has to be before it may be mentioned.

You are a man with something worth saying out loud, and wanting to tell somebody has never once been the same as wanting to be admired.

Rejoice with me

There is a moment in Luke where somebody finds something and does something about it immediately, and the something is out of all proportion to the size of what was found.

And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. (Luke 15:6, King James Version)

Calleth together his friends.

For one sheep. A man with a hundred of them, who is now back to having a hundred of them, calls a group of people together about it.

And nothing in the passage treats that as excessive. Jesus is telling it as the natural and obvious thing a man does, and the whole force of the parable depends on nobody in the audience finding the reaction strange.

You have a man in scripture calling people together over one recovered thing, and a reaction out of proportion to a sheep has never once been treated there as excessive. Luke 15:6 records the calling together without a word of comment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that an ordinary human shape rather than a curiosity.

And look at what he actually says. Rejoice with me.

Not look what I did. Not tell me I am a good shepherd. Rejoice with me, which is an invitation into something rather than a request for anything.

You were never wanting to be praised, and an invitation to be glad alongside somebody has never once been the same thing as asking for an opinion. The Spirit of God is the one who moves people toward each other over small recovered things, and the written word puts the words rejoice with me in his mouth rather than anything about himself.

The rule about size was never issued

So here is the practical claim, and it is about a rule nobody wrote.

Somewhere in you there is a threshold. A thing has to be above a certain size before it may be mentioned to another person, and below that line it has to be carried quietly.

Nobody set that threshold. It is not in any book. It has never been stated out loud by anybody in your life, and if you asked the people you would ring they would not recognize it.

You have been obeying a threshold that was never once issued to you, and a rule nobody wrote has never once been binding on anybody. Luke 15:6 records a man calling people together over one sheep, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a rule off a man that nobody ever put on him.

And here is what the threshold has cost, and it is more than one phone call.

Everything you have finished in that house has been finished silently. Nobody has ever been told about any of it, which means nobody has ever been glad about any of it with you, which means every finished thing has been a private event in a house full of people.

You have years of finished work that nobody was ever invited into, and a thing done silently has never once given anybody the chance to be glad about it. The Spirit of God is the one who carries a small thing between two people, and Luke 15:6 has a man issuing an invitation rather than making a report.

And one more, because the embarrassment in this row is real.

You were never going to be thought foolish, and a man telling a friend he finished something has never once been a man anybody laughed at. Luke 15:6 records friends being called together and nobody declining, and the Holy Spirit is the one present while an awkward call gets made.

Call one person and tell them

Here is the assignment and the shape of the call is the whole of it.

Call one person and tell them what you finished.

Actually call. Not a message, which lets both of you off, and which lets the other person answer with a symbol rather than a voice. A call, which is two people, which is the point.

You have one call available tonight that costs about ninety seconds, and telling somebody what you did has never once required the thing to be large. Luke 15:6 has a man calling friends together over one sheep, and the Holy Spirit is the one present while a phone rings.

Say it plainly. I finished the shelves tonight. That is all.

And do not build it up into a conversation about anything else. Do not open with how are things and get to it at the end. Do not attach a second reason for calling so that this one is covered.

That is the whole temptation and it is the thing that would hollow it out. Ring them, say the thing, let them say whatever they say, and then talk about whatever comes next or say goodbye.

They will probably say something warm and slightly surprised. And the surprise is not because the shelf is small. It is because the phone rang at all, and that is a thing that has not happened, and the not happening has been the whole cost.