A Verb, Not A Job

Ari has never held any position, and about eleven people would say, if asked, that he is the person they would ring.

Those two facts have coexisted for about twenty years and he has never once been able to put them into a single sentence.

He is not on anything. He has never been elected, appointed, ordained, or listed. There is no line anywhere with his name on it, and this is not a grievance, because he has been asked twice and said no both times and would say no again for reasons that are his own and are good ones.

But the ringing happens. It has happened for twenty years. Eleven people, roughly, and about four of them regularly, and one of them at hours that would surprise you.

And there is no word for that.

He noticed the gap when he was filling in something for his mother's care, of all things, and there was a question about who her main support was, and he found he could not answer it. Not for reasons of modesty. For reasons of vocabulary. Everything available was either a role he does not hold or a relationship term that was inaccurate.

He wrote friend, which is true and was about forty per cent of it.

Now here is what the gap costs, and it is not status.

A thing without a word cannot be thought about clearly. Ari cannot ask himself whether he is doing it well, because doing what well? He cannot ask whether he is doing too much of it, or whether one of the four should be handled differently, or whether he has enough left for the next decade of it.

Twenty years of a demanding function, examined never, because the examining would require a noun he does not have.

You have your own version. There is something you have done for years that has no position attached to it, and you have never had a word for it, and you have therefore never been able to look at it properly.

Nobody here is going to give you a title. That is the last thing this site would do.

But the word in Ezekiel is not a title either, and what it actually is might be useful.

God describes it as five things He does

There is a passage in Ezekiel where God, having spent a chapter on shepherds who did not do the work, says what He Himself will do, and the sentence is a list of verbs.

I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.Ezekiel 34:16

Seek. Bring again. Bind up. Strengthen.

There is no noun in that sentence at all. Nothing about who He is in the arrangement, no office, no designation. Four verbs and the objects they act on, and the objects are described by what has happened to them rather than by what they are: the lost one, the driven away one, the broken one, the sick one.

That is the whole definition, given by God about Himself, and it is entirely a description of activity.

Which means the thing Ari has no word for is precisely the thing the passage describes, and the reason he has no word is that the passage does not supply one either. It supplies verbs.

And what you have been doing has a plain description even though it has no title. That is not my workaround: the written word defines it as four actions with no noun attached, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who could not fill in a box on a form.

And you have been doing the thing itself rather than an amateur version of it. The word puts seeking and binding and strengthening as the content, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which was never dependent on a list somewhere having your name on it.

Why the missing noun matters and what to do about it

Here is the practical part.

You do not need a title, and taking one would change the thing. Ephesians 4 gives the five as functions for equipping everybody else, and a function that becomes a rank has stopped doing what it was given for. Nothing here is going to suggest you get yourself named.

But you do need a description, and those are different objects.

A title is a claim about your position relative to other people. A description is a sentence about what you do, and you can have one privately, in your own head, without a single person being told.

I look after four people, and about eleven would ring me. That is a description. It contains no claim, it ranks nobody, and it is the first sentence in twenty years that would let Ari ask himself whether he is doing it well.

And you are permitted to describe your own life accurately. The word says let every man prove his own work, and proving requires knowing what the work is, and the Spirit is the one who makes honest self-description possible where both boasting and false modesty fail.

And no rank was ever part of this. The word says the five were given for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, and the whole purpose clause points away from the five and toward everybody else, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that clear in somebody who has just been handed a sentence about themselves.

Nobody is telling you to take a position

I want that plain, and it is the same thing twice because it matters.

Do not go and get yourself appointed to something in order to have a word. The two people who asked you were not wrong to ask and you were not wrong to decline, and this article is not a late argument for the other answer.

And do not, on the strength of a description, start behaving as though you have authority you do not have. A man who looks after four people has no standing over anybody, and a sentence in his own head does not confer any.

The description is for you, so that twenty years can be looked at.

And you are not less because you hold nothing. The word says God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased Him, and the setting is His, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine placing rather than a consolation for somebody who is not on a list.