He Assigned Me a Table

They gave her the young women when she was twenty six, and she said yes in a corridor in about four seconds, because she was the sort of person who says yes in corridors.

Twenty two of them at the peak. Sixteen and seventeen year olds, mostly, and a few older ones who kept coming because it was the only room in their week where nobody wanted anything from them. She was good at it. She was not good at the admin and she was not good at the safeguarding forms, but she was extraordinary in the room, and everybody knew it, including her.

The night before her first Sunday she prayed in her car in the church parking lot, out loud, and told God: these are mine. I will stay with them. I am not going to be one of the ones who does two years and disappears.

She did two years and disappeared.

There was a reason and it is not a shameful one. She burned out, comprehensively, in a way that frightened the people who love her. But she did not resign properly. She missed one, and then two, and then she sent a message, and then she stopped answering the messages that came back, and the group ran on a rota of parents for four months and then somebody else took it and has had it for six years and is, by every account, doing it beautifully.

And now she is thirty four and she is well again, and here is what she believes: it was withdrawn. Not just the group, which obviously somebody else has, and rightly. The thing behind the group. Whatever it was that made a room go quiet when she started talking. She thinks that was an assignment, and she thinks she proved she could not carry it, and she thinks it has been given to somebody steadier.

You may have dropped something you were given. And you may have concluded, not loudly, but somewhere underneath, that God does what any sensible organization does with a person who cannot finish, which is to move the work elsewhere and stop offering.

The worst possible moment to appoint anybody

I want to show you a sentence Jesus says, and the timing of it is the argument.

It is the last supper. He has just told them that one of them is going to hand Him over. And immediately after that, Luke records that they fall into an argument about which of them is the greatest, which is possibly the least appropriate conversation ever held in a room.

And into that, He says this.

And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.Luke 22:29-30

You are appointed, present tense, by somebody who made the appointment with the failure already in the room. Luke 22:29 is spoken hours before every one of them scattered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has held that appointment steady while you counted yourself out.

He knew what they were about to do

He is looking at them while He says it. One of them is already arranging the price. Another is about to swear, three times, in a courtyard, that he does not know the man. All of them are going to run within a few hours.

And He appoints them a kingdom.

Not: I will appoint you one, if this goes better than I expect. Not: the appointment stands subject to your conduct this evening. He appoints, present tense, at the table, hours before the worst night of their lives, and He names what it is for: that ye may eat and drink at my table.

You are appointed a place at a table, and He made that appointment with your capacity to fail in full view. Luke 22:29 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of an upper room and puts it in a car in a church parking lot.

I want to be careful and exact here, because this category is about a place and not about a job, and blurring them would be cruel in both directions.

The group is not yours. Somebody else has it, is doing it well, and should keep doing it. That is not a punishment and it is not a demotion, and if you ever get given a room full of teenagers again it will be a fresh gift and not a restoration. Roles move. That is how a healthy church works and you would be the first to say so about anybody else.

But the appointment in Luke 22 is not a role. It is a seat. And a seat is not what is reallocated when a rota changes.

You have a place at His table that no rota has ever had the authority to touch. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is exactly what He specifies the appointment is for, and His Spirit is the one who has kept it while you have been reading a staffing decision as a verdict.

What burning out is not

And now the part I most want you to hear, because you are the sort of person who would rather be told the hard thing.

Burning out is not a moral event. You have treated it as one for six years. You have gone over the messages you did not answer and the four months of parents covering and you have built out of that a case that you are unreliable at the root, and you have submitted that case to a court that is not sitting.

You were twenty eight and doing more than a person can do, and you broke. That happened. It is a real thing with real consequences and some of them were other people's, and I am not going to smooth that over.

It is still not the kind of thing that changes a seat.

You are seated by appointment and not by performance, and the appointment was made by somebody who was never surprised by you. Scripture puts the appointing in His mouth on the night of the failures, and the Spirit of God has held that seat unmoved for six years.