Differing, And That Is The Design

There is a shoebox on the shelf in his garage with eleven years of index cards in it, and every card is evidence of something he was never built to do.

He got up in front of people about four times a year for over a decade. He wrote everything out. He practiced in the truck on the way in, out loud, with the radio off. And every single time, from the first line to the last, his hands shook and his mouth went to paper and he heard his own voice come out flat and small in a room that had been warm thirty seconds earlier. Afterward men would shake his hand and say good job and he could tell, the way you can always tell, that they were being kind.

He kept doing it because that was what useful looked like. The men he admired did that. So the arithmetic seemed simple: get good at the thing the useful men do, and eventually you will be one.

He never got good at it. And somewhere in the eleventh year he stopped, quietly, without announcing anything, and the thought that moved in afterward is the one he has now: if I disappeared tomorrow, I honestly do not think anybody would be short of anything.

Here is what he does not see, and it is the thing everyone else in that town would tell you inside ten seconds. He knows when a man's surgery is. He knows which family is running thin this month without anybody having said a word about it. He turns up at the right hour with the right thing and he never mentions it afterward. He has done that for twenty years and he has never once counted it, because in his own ledger it does not appear as anything. And you have a ledger like that too, do you not. Let us go and look at what Paul actually says the design is.

The differing is not a defect

Name the pit. The pit is not that you lack a gift. The pit is that you have been running a comparison, and comparison is not humility, it is a measurement error with a religious accent on it.

Here is how the error works. You pick the most visible gift in the room. You take its shape as the standard shape. Then you measure yourself against it and you come up short every time, which feels like honesty, and you call the whole thing knowing your limitations. But you never checked whether the standard was a standard. It was one part, doing its part, and you turned it into a ruler.

Paul saw this coming and wrote against it directly.

You have a part that was never supposed to look like his. Romans 12:4 says the members have not the same office and it stands written that way. The offices were handed out by the Spirit, and He was not distracted when He came to you.

For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith;Romans 12:4-6

Read the word differing again. It is not a concession. It is not Paul being nice about the ones who did not get much. It is the structural claim of the entire passage: the body works because the parts are not the same, and if they were the same you would not have a body, you would have a pile.

You were given a different gift on purpose, and the difference is the point of you. Romans 12:6 promises gifts differing according to the grace that is given, and the giving belongs to the Spirit and to no committee anywhere.

Where the hearing would be

Paul makes the same argument in Corinth and there he gets almost funny about it, which tells you how common the problem is.

He imagines a foot saying: because I am not a hand, I am not of the body. And he asks, dryly, whether that reasoning makes it any less part of the body. Then he asks what would happen if the whole body were an eye. Where would the hearing be? It is a joke with a knife in it, because a room full of the same gift is not a stronger room, it is a deaf one.

You are a member of that body, and the argument you have been making against yourself has already been answered. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God set the members every one of them as it pleased Him, it is written just that way, and the same Spirit did the setting.

Now the next part matters more than anything else here, especially if you are reading this with very little left in the tank.

A few verses later Paul says something that ought to be printed on the inside of every tired believer's eyelids: the members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary. Not tolerated. Not included out of kindness. Necessary. The word is doing full weight in that sentence, and he is not talking about the strong ones on a bad week, he is talking about the parts that look weak all the time.

You are necessary in that body, at the strength you actually have today. 1 Corinthians 12:22 says the feeble members are necessary, in writing, and the Spirit put no footnote underneath it.

And I am not going to hand you a job. I am not going to tell you what your gift is, or where it ought to be put to work, or suggest that what you need is somewhere to go and do it. You did not come here for an assignment and one more assignment is the last thing you need. What I am telling you is what you already are in a body God assembled, which is true before you do one further thing about it.