Counting The Ones Who Left

Wendell can give you eleven names in order, and it took him about four seconds, and he has never once counted the other lot.

The eleven are the people who left. Over about twenty-six years. He does not think about them constantly and he is not bitter about a single one, and most of them left for good and ordinary reasons: a job, a marriage, a move, and two of them for reasons that were nobody's fault and that he still thinks about.

But the list exists. It is complete, it is in order, and he can produce it faster than his own phone number.

He found this out because his son-in-law asked him, casually, over a tailgate, roughly how many people had come through that thing over the years.

And Wendell started with the eleven.

Not the total. Not the people currently there, not the ones who came and stayed and are still standing in that yard. He went straight to the list, and he was three names in before he noticed what he was doing, and then he stopped and stood there with a cup in his hand.

His son-in-law had asked how many came. He had answered how many went.

You have your own version. There is a list you could produce in seconds, and there is another list you have never made, and you have never wondered why one of them is written down in you and the other is not.

Nobody here is going to tell you the eleven do not matter. They do. Two of them still keep you awake and they should.

But it is worth knowing which list you have been carrying and which one you have not, because a man is shaped by the tally he keeps.

The verb He uses about His own is knowing, not keeping

There is a sentence of Jesus in the shepherd chapter where He describes the relationship, and the verb is worth stopping on.

I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.John 10:14

Know. Twice, in both directions.

Not count. Not retain, not keep, not hold on to. Know, which is a word about depth rather than about totals, and it runs both ways in that sentence, which means it describes something mutual rather than a score somebody is keeping.

And read on a few verses. He speaks about other sheep not of that fold, and about laying His life down and taking it again, and about the Father knowing Him. There is a great deal in that passage about what a shepherd does and there is nothing anywhere in it about a headcount.

And you are known and you know them. That is not my sentiment: the written word puts knowing in both directions as the mark of the relationship, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man standing at a gate with a cup in his hand.

And nothing in your charge was ever a tally. The word gives feeding and knowing and laying down, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man notice that the only list he has been keeping is one he was never asked for.

Where the eleven came from

Here is the thing about the list, and it is not a fault.

You do not keep a list of the ones who stayed because they are still here. They have not resolved into a fact yet. A person still in the room is an ongoing thing, and ongoing things do not get filed.

The eleven are finished. They have edges. Each one has a last conversation and a date and a reason, and a mind files a finished thing and leaves an unfinished thing running, which is why Wendell can produce the list and cannot produce the total.

That is not morbidity. It is how memory works, and it happens to everybody, and it is the reason a shepherd who has done twenty-six good years can genuinely believe he has mostly lost people.

And you have not mostly lost people. The word says the Lord knoweth them that are His, and the knowing is His and it is not a list you are responsible for maintaining, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real handover to a man who has been holding one for twenty-six years.

And the two who keep you awake are not held against you. The word says the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep and never says he keeps every one of them, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man grieve a loss without reading it as a verdict on the whole of his work.

Nobody is telling you to stop caring about the eleven

I want that said, because a message like this can end up asking somebody to put down the wrong thing.

Do not stop thinking about the two. That is love and it should cost you something, and a man who could shrug that off would be a worse shepherd rather than a better one.

And do not go and make a list of the ones who stayed, in a notebook, as a corrective exercise. That is just another tally, pointed the other way, and it will not do what you want.

What is available is smaller. It is a question, asked once, honestly: how many stayed?

Not to write down. Just to notice how long it takes you to answer, and to notice that the answer is a larger number than the eleven and that you have never once known it.

And your work has not been mostly loss. The word says he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which has never been a figure arrived at by subtraction.