Eleven Years With The Same Six

He counted the chairs before anybody arrived, the way he had counted them for eleven years, and there were six, and there had been six for eleven years.

He put the kettle on. He set out the same mugs. He wrote nothing on a board because there was no board. Six people came in out of the rain at half past seven, hung their coats on the radiator, and started talking about a hospital appointment one of them had on Thursday, and that was the meeting, and by ten they had prayed and gone home.

Later that night he was on his phone and he saw it. A man he had trained alongside, years ago, standing on a platform somewhere with lights on him and a room behind him you could not see the back of. Good man. Not a proud man. Doing real work.

And the thing came up in his chest that he would never have said out loud to anybody in the world.

What have I been doing?

Not because he despised the six. He loved the six. He knew which of them took sugar and which of them could not be phoned before ten in the morning and which of them was still, quietly, not speaking to her brother. He knew the whole of the inside of their lives, and they knew his, and that had taken eleven years to build and it could not have been built in less.

But somewhere along the way he had picked up a story about himself, and the story went: this is the waiting room. This is what you do before you are sent. Everybody else got their letter and yours got lost in the post.

He stacked the chairs.

Six.

He stood there with his hand on the back of the last one, in a cold hall with the strip light buzzing, and he said something honest into the empty room.

"God, am I late?"

Duration is the gift, not the delay before it

Now listen to me, because I want to take a knife to a lie tonight, and it is a lie that lives in good people and never gets named because it wears the clothes of humility.

You have been told, mostly without words, that ministry is a thing that begins when the room gets bigger. That what you are doing now is preparation. That the years are runway. And so you have spent eleven years doing the actual work while feeling, every single Tuesday, like a man in a corridor waiting for a door to open.

Beloved, you are not in the corridor. You have been in the room the entire time.

Hear what a shepherd is actually told to do.

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, watching over it, not because you have to but because you want to, not for gain but eagerly, not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.1 Peter 5:2

The flock that is among you. Not the flock that is coming. Not the flock you would have if the thing grew. The ones who are among you, now, tonight, with their coats on the radiator.

And you are already in the room you have been waiting to enter. The word gives the charge in the present tense over the flock that is among you and never once mentions a number, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man stacking six chairs under a buzzing strip light.

And then look at what is not there. No number. No target. No sentence anywhere in that charge about how many, or by when, or what the six should have become by year eleven. The whole weight of it falls on one word, and the word is shepherd, and it is a verb about presence and not about scale.

A shepherd who leaves is not a shepherd who has been promoted. A shepherd who leaves is a hired hand, and the whole point of the picture Jesus drew is that you can tell the difference between the two only by watching what happens over time. The love is proved by the staying. That is why the staying takes so long to prove anything. And that is exactly why it looks, from the outside and often from the inside, like nothing is happening.

Something is happening. It is happening at the speed that people actually change, which is the speed of a decade, and nobody films that.

And the staying is the thing itself. The word says the good shepherd is known by not fleeing when it costs, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that eleven years of half past seven in the rain is the proof and not the delay before it.

You know which of them cannot be phoned before ten. That took years. That is worth years.