I Cannot Do The Inviting Part

Nine years of trying to become a person who invites, and she has two conversations to show for it and she handled both of them badly.

She has done the courses. She has read the book everybody in that church reads, twice, and there is nothing wrong with the book. She has prayed about it in the way you pray about something you are certain is a fault in you.

What actually happens is this.

There is a moment in a conversation where the opening arrives, and she can feel it arrive, and something in her chest goes tight and cold and her mind produces four sentences at once and none of them are sayable, and then the moment closes and the other person is talking about something else.

Every time. For nine years. Including with people she loves.

And in that church the language is all one way. Who have you brought. Who are you praying for. There is a wall with a map on it. Nobody is unkind about it and nobody has ever said anything to her, and that is somehow worse, because she has invented every accusation herself and she has had nine years to get good at it.

Here is what she has never counted.

There is a woman in that church who has been in her front room every Tuesday evening for four years, and who says openly that she would not be alive without those Tuesdays.

That woman came because somebody else invited her.

God hath set the members, as it hath pleased him

Sit down in the armchair a minute, because Paul is dealing with exactly this in a church that had a favorite gift, and his answer is not gentle encouragement, it is a statement about who did the arranging.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

God hath set the members.

Set is a placing word, and it is past tense, and the setting is finished. It has already been done, by Him, and the verse adds the reason: as it hath pleased him.

Not as it would be most convenient. Not according to what the church you are in happens to value this decade. As it pleased Him, which is the highest possible authority for an arrangement, and it is written, and it is the arrangement you are currently apologizing for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who made it.

And read the verses around it, because Paul is answering people who thought one part of the body was the important one and everybody else was substandard. That is the whole argument of the chapter, and he is blunt about it: if the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing.

Hear this in your own front room. You are not disobedient, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture says God set every member as it pleased Him and calls that finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept a woman alive on your Tuesdays for four years.

Now let me name what has happened in that church, because nobody there has done anything wrong and I am not going to be clever at their expense.

A church names what it can see.

Inviting is visible. It happens at a door, it produces a new face, it can be counted and celebrated and it should be. What you do happens in an armchair with two cups and no witnesses over four years, and there is no moment where anybody could stand up and mention it, and so it has never been named in that building.

That is not neglect. It is a limitation of what can be seen from a platform.

Hear this too, and let it land where the two cups are. You have not been failing for nine years, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the setting of every member in His hands and says it pleased Him to do it that way, and the Spirit of God has never once asked a woman to become a different member of the body than the one He set her as.

And I want to be careful, because there is a lazy version of this article and it would be false. Nobody is telling you that you never have to speak. If the Lord puts a specific sentence in your mouth for a specific person one day, say it, and you probably will.

What is being taken off you is the nine years of trying to become somebody, and the sentence underneath it that says the thing you actually do is not the real work.