The Flat-Pack Box at the Lift

For the one who stands in an open lift deciding whether it is allowed.

The gift was already in your hands four years before anybody gave you a badge for it, and it was still there the day they took the badge away.

You're in the lift on the fourth floor with your finger on the button, holding the doors, and there's a woman about fifteen feet down the corridor with a flat pack box she cannot manage.

She is new to the building and moved in on Saturday. The box is one of those long ones that is far too heavy at one end and has no handholds anywhere useful at all.

You know precisely what to do here. You did exactly this for six years, on a Sunday morning, roughly forty times a morning, and you were extremely good at it. Spotting the person who is struggling, arriving without any fuss, solving it in about eleven seconds, and moving on before anybody could thank you.

And you stand there with your finger on the button for about four seconds, which is long enough for her to look up.

The verb is in the past tense, and you received that gift long before anybody gave you a role for it. The written word says you have received it already, and the Spirit has not withdrawn it since.

The Four Seconds

Take the four seconds apart, because a great deal happened inside them.

In four seconds you noticed, diagnosed, and worked out the solution. All of that was automatic and took almost none of the available time. That part of you is entirely intact, and it was running before you had consciously decided anything whatever.

It is worth registering that as good news rather than as background. Four years without a role has not degraded the capability by a single degree, which is not what you would expect of a skill that had depended on the structure for its existence.

The rest of the four seconds was a different process. It was a search for authorization, conducted rapidly, in a lift, for an act that requires none.

You were looking for whatever used to make this obviously appropriate. A lanyard, a role, a Sunday morning, a structure in which helping a stranger with a box is precisely what you are standing there for. None of that was available to you, so the search failed, and the failure is what kept your finger on the button.

Searches like that do not announce themselves. From the inside it feels like hesitation, or politeness, or a reasonable concern about intruding on somebody you have never met.

Your search was for authorization, and it failed because none exists. The written word puts the gift in your hands already, and the Spirit was the one who made you notice her.

As Every Man Hath Received

Here's the verse, and the tense of the first verb settles the whole question.

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.1 Peter 4:10 (KJV)

Hath received. Past tense, completed. The receiving is not pending, and it is not conditional on a position being held, and Peter writes as though it has already happened to everybody he's addressing.

Then, even so minister the same. The instruction follows directly from the possession. Because you have it, use it, and no intervening step is described between the having and the using.

Peter wrote that to believers scattered across five provinces with no buildings and very little structure of any kind, and it reaches past them to a man holding a lift door open.

The receiving is already complete, and the instruction follows straight from it. The written word puts no step between having and using, and the Spirit has left the gift with you.

Six Years Did Not Install It

Be precise about where the ability came from, because you've got the order wrong.

You think the six years gave you this. They didn't. They gave you practice, and refinement, and a context in which to use it about forty times a Sunday, which is a great deal of practice.

But the noticing came first, by a very long way. You were the person who spotted the struggling stranger long before anybody asked you to be, at school, at work, and at a family wedding when you were nineteen. Somebody eventually noticed that you did it and gave you a role in which to do it rather more often.

That is how it usually works. Roles are given to people who have already demonstrated the thing, which means by definition that the demonstrating came first, in ordinary life, with no authorization whatsoever.

The role recognized the gift. It didn't install it, it can't remove it, and it certainly didn't take it with it when it ended.

The role recognized what you already had and could not take it away. The written word says you had received it, and the Spirit has kept it working in lifts.

I Am Not Telling You to Force Help on People

Be careful, because there's a version of this that's a nuisance and you've probably met it.

Some people do not want help and are entitled not to want it. Offer, accept a no gracefully, and go on your way. A gift used badly is one that takes over somebody else's afternoon in order to make the giver feel useful.

Nor am I telling you that structure never helps. Six years of a defined role let you help a very large number of people, and that was worth having.

What I want off you is the search. Not the courtesy. Not the care about not intruding.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Jubilee This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.