Putting My Own Name On The List

She has typed it every Wednesday since the year the vicar changed, which is nine years and a bit.

It goes out Wednesday evening. Twenty two people have it. She does the layout herself, and there is a way she does the headings that somebody once told her was very clear, and she has done it that way ever since.

She knows things about that parish that nobody else knows. Not gossip. The other kind: who has been on it three years running, who came off in the spring and went back on in November, whose name is on there under an initial only because that is how they asked for it.

In April she had something of her own. It is not the sort of thing that requires an ambulance and it is not going away, and there is a letter about it in a drawer, and she has told two people, one of whom is her sister.

On the Wednesday after the letter she got as far as typing her own initials.

They sat there for about four seconds at the bottom of the third section, in the place where they would have gone if somebody else had asked her to add them.

Then she deleted them and sent it out.

She has done that twice more since. She could tell you the exact feeling that produces the deletion and she has never been able to put a word to it, and the nearest she has come is that it felt like taking something.

Yet the Lord thinketh upon me

Sit down at the desk with the document open, because there is a line at the very end of a psalm that says the thing you cannot type, and the man saying it does not soften it at all.

But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me: Thou art my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God.Psalm 40:17

Two halves, and both of them are said by the same man in the same breath.

I am poor and needy. He does not qualify it, he does not apologize, and he does not point out that other people are worse off.

Yet the Lord thinketh upon me.

He puts himself on the list. In writing. In a psalm that has been sung for three thousand years by people who did not know his name, and there is no embarrassment anywhere in it.

Hear this at your own desk. You are not taking anything, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has a man naming himself as poor and needy and then saying that the Lord thinks upon him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been thinking upon you through every Wednesday you spent typing everybody else.

Now let me name the feeling you have not been able to word, because I think I know what it is.

It is not humility, though it is standing where humility usually stands.

It is that you have been the administrator of that list for nine years, and an administrator is by definition outside the thing she administers, and after nine years that stops being a job and becomes a location. Nothing written in Scripture put you there, and the Holy Spirit has never once treated you as staff.

You are not the parish. You are the person who types the parish. And a person who types the parish cannot appear in it without the whole arrangement in her head coming apart.

Hear this too, and let it come apart. You are not staff, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the poor and needy man inside the psalm he is writing, and the Spirit of God has never once run a category for the people who organize the prayer and are therefore not covered by it.

And now the practical thing, because there is a real difficulty here and I am not going to pretend there is not.

Twenty two people will see your initials.

Some of them will ring. One of them will ring immediately and will be somebody you would rather it was not. There will be a conversation on Sunday that you cannot control, and you have been managing that risk without ever admitting that is what you were doing. The written word never made control the price of being carried, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to manage anything.

So put your initials on, exactly as you would for anybody who asked for it that way. That is what they are for and it is why that convention exists and you have honored it for other people for nine years.

You do not owe anybody an explanation. The letter stays in the drawer. What goes on the list is what you decide goes on the list, which is true this week for exactly the same reason it has been true every other week.