What They Cannot Spare

The bags go down on the concrete first, both of them, while she gets her breath at the turn of the second flight.

Four white handles stretched thin, the kind that stop being handles and start being wire somewhere around the third minute. Tinned soup at the bottom, because tinned soup is always at the bottom. Rain has been coming in sideways along the open walkway all afternoon and there is a dark half moon on each shoulder of her coat. Below her, somebody's television is loud enough that she can hear the adverts change. Two doors along, a man is talking to his dog in the voice people only use for dogs.

She has done this every Friday for four years, since the lift got sealed off and the man on the third landing stopped being able to come down. He will say thank you. He always says thank you, and then he will say the thing about the price of butter, and she will laugh in the right place, and she will go back down and let herself into her own flat and put the kettle on and think nothing further about it at all.

Except this Friday she is thinking something, and it arrived on the second landing with the bags on the floor. If I stopped tomorrow. If I moved away. If I simply did not come. Nobody would be short of anything. Somebody else would do it, or nobody would and he would have it delivered, and the world would keep its exact shape.

And you know that thought, because you have done the same sum somewhere. Maybe it is not a stairwell. Maybe it is a rota, a phone call you make on Sunday nights, a chair you sit in, a name you have prayed over every night for eleven years. You ran the arithmetic and you got the same answer she got: the people of God would be at full strength without me. You are not bitter about it, either, which is the strange part. You would simply like to know whether you are actually in this thing or standing near it.

The sum you did in your head and never once checked

I am not going to tell you that the sum was mean of you. It was not mean. It was careful. It came from a person who does not want to overstate their own importance, and there is a great deal of the Kingdom in that, and it is exactly the kind of person the enemy of your soul can talk into standing at the edge of a room for thirty years.

But the sum has a fault in it, and the fault is not humility. The fault is that you did the arithmetic on the wrong body. You added up what a building needs, or what a family needs, or what a rota needs, and then you quietly treated the answer as though it were God's arrangement of His own people. It is not. He did the arranging, and He did not consult a rota.

You are already inside the people of God, and you are inside it as a working part rather than as a guest. That is not my encouragement to you and it is not a way of being kind about your Friday. It is what Scripture says out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a written sentence land in a person like a hand on the shoulder. You did not join this. He put you in it.

Here is Paul, writing to a church that had exactly your problem in the opposite direction. Some of them thought they were the eye. Some of them had quietly decided they were the foot and therefore not really in the body at all. He answers both in the same breath, and it is the second one he takes the most trouble over.

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.1 Corinthians 12:22

Read that slowly, because it does not say what people usually make it say. It does not say the weaker parts are welcome. It does not say they are appreciated. It says indispensable, which is a word about what cannot be done without.

And notice who did the placing. A few lines earlier he writes that God arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as He chose. Not as the rota chose. Not as anybody's gifting survey chose. You have a place in this body that God Himself assigned, and it is held for you today. The written word says He arranged it, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that true on a wet Friday when it does not feel like an arrangement at all. Nobody appointed you and nobody can unappoint you.

The eye and the hand and the sum that gets it wrong

Paul does something in that chapter that I love him for. He lets the foot speak. He does not correct it before it has finished. "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body." He lets the sentence stand there in full, in the middle of Scripture, so that anybody who has ever thought it can see it in print and know it was heard.

Then he answers it, and the answer is not a compliment. It is a fact about anatomy. That would not make it any less a part of the body.

Do you see how that dismantles the arithmetic? The foot's sum was not wrong about the hand. The hand really is more visible, and it really does more of the things people notice, and the foot really cannot do them. Everything the foot observed was correct. What was wrong was the conclusion drawn from it, and the conclusion was drawn by the foot, at night, on its own.

You were placed in the body by a decision that was made about you and not by you, and it was made in love. That is the written word's own account of it, and the Holy Spirit is not interested in leaving you at the edge of something Christ has already put you into the middle of. I am not adding anything to what God said here. I am only refusing to let you subtract from it.

And I want to say the other half plainly, because this is where these articles usually go wrong. Nobody is about to hand you a role. Nothing here is asking you to take on more, join something, volunteer for something or find your slot. If you are reading this from a bed you cannot get out of, or through the kind of tiredness that makes a phone feel heavy, hear this: the body of Christ has no reserve list. There is no tier of the people of God for those who can only do a little. The measure of a limb was never how much of the work it carries. It was whether the Head put it there.