You Already Received The Thing

The fern has had a very good summer. It has come up over the side step and out sideways and put a green roof over the whole corner by the recycling bins, and in the first cool week of the fall she takes the shears to it, mostly out of irritation.

Three cuts in, the shears hit cardboard.

It is a box. It is a box with her own name on it in her sister's handwriting, gone soft and furred with damp along one edge, and a shipping label with a date on it from the middle of June. It has been sitting on her own step, eighteen inches from the door she uses every single day, for the whole of a wet summer.

She sits down on the step with it on her knees in the afternoon sun and gets the tape off with a thumbnail. Everything inside is fine. Everything inside is exactly what her sister said would be in it, back in June, on the phone, when she said keep an eye out, it is coming.

And what she says out loud, to a fern and a recycling bin, is: I have been waiting for this.

You have said that sentence too, and you have said it about something more important than a box. You are waiting to be equipped. Waiting to be given something before you can do anything. And you have been so certain the giving is still ahead of you that you have never once looked at what is already sitting on the step, growing a fern over it, eighteen inches from the door you use every day.

The verb is in the past tense

There is one sentence in Peter's letter that settles this, and the whole weight of it sits in a verb tense that people read straight over.

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.1 Peter 4:10

Hath received. Past. Completed. Not shall receive, not may one day be granted, not will be considered for. The sentence does not open a possibility, it reports a delivery, and everything after it is written on the assumption that the delivery already happened.

And read the first two words again, because they are doing something enormous. As every man. Every one. Peter is not addressing the capable third of a congregation. He is not carving out the people who are unwell, or exhausted, or a long way from anybody, or ninety, or fifteen. Every one has received. There is no waiting list attached to that sentence and there never was.

You have already received it, and the receiving is behind you rather than ahead of you. 1 Peter 4:10 puts it in the past tense on purpose, and the Holy Spirit did the delivering long before you started watching for the truck.

Now look at the word Peter uses for what you do next. Stewards. A steward is not an applicant. A steward is a person who already has something in their hands and whose entire job description is what they do with it. There is no such thing as a steward of an empty hand. The word itself assumes possession, which means the moment God calls you a steward, He has told you what you are holding.

You are a steward and not an applicant, and nobody is reviewing your file. Scripture uses the word steward about you, and His Spirit is not asking you to qualify for something He already handed over.

Manifold means yours does not look like theirs

Here is where most of the waiting actually comes from, and it is not laziness and it is not false modesty. It is a comparison you made years ago and never revisited.

Peter says the manifold grace of God. The word means many-colored, varied, coming in kinds. Paul says the same thing in a different way, that the one Spirit divides to every one severally as He will. Severally. Separately. Individually, in kinds, on purpose.

Which means the thing you were handed was never going to look like the thing you have been watching other people do. And if you have spent years measuring what is in your hands against a description of what is in somebody else's, of course you concluded that nothing had arrived. You were checking the wrong box against the wrong label.

You were given something that is not a smaller copy of anybody else's. 1 Peter 4:10 says manifold and 1 Corinthians 12:11 says severally, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the dividing, which means the shape of yours was a decision and not an oversight.

And I am not going to tell you what it is. Nobody writing to you can, and anyone who hands you a slot has skipped the only step that matters. It is already in your hands, which means you are the one who has seen it, and it will almost certainly be something so ordinary to you that you have never counted it: the way you notice who is missing, or the way you can sit with somebody without needing them to be better, or the way things get remembered, or the fact that you pray for people and actually do it.

It is already yours, and it did not come with a start date printed on the side. It is written that He gave it, and written that He gave it to every one, and His Spirit is not holding back a signal you have been listening for.