Because Nobody Better Was Free

They asked him to read at the wedding. Two hundred people, the whole family, and the bride is his niece and she asked him herself, on the phone, sounding pleased about it.

He said yes. He was glad for about four minutes.

Then the arithmetic started, the way it always does, quietly and with no malice in it at all. Her father would have done it, but he is not well. Her brother lives abroad. The other uncle reads badly and everybody knows it. So they came to him, which is not the same thing as choosing him, and if any of those three had been available he would not have been asked.

He does this after everything. After being asked to look after the keys. After being made a godfather in 2009. After his boss handed him a project last spring that turned out to matter.

He has never once told anybody he does it. If you asked him he would say he was being realistic. He would say that flattering yourself is exactly what you are warned about, and he would be able to quote you something.

He read at the wedding. He read well. And in the car home he worked out why they had come to him.

If you have your own version of the arithmetic, you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you the arithmetic is not humility.

What you were warned against is not what you are doing

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting most of your life for anybody to say it out loud.

Humility was never a low estimate of yourself. It never was. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact about that, because nothing else lands until it is said. You took an instruction from people you trusted, you kept it faithfully at real cost, and keeping a badly worded instruction is loyalty aimed at the wrong number. There is nothing in it to be ashamed of.

Now read the one place where God explains a choice, because it is the only explanation He gives and it is not the one you would expect.

The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you.Deuteronomy 7:7

Look at what is ruled out and what is left. Size is ruled out. Strength, numbers, availability, the state of the competition: all of it gone in one clause. And what is left standing as the reason is a single fact about Him. Because the Lord loved you.

You were chosen for a reason that has nothing in it about who else was free, and the reason has never been amended. That is not my reassurance. It is written in Deuteronomy 7:7, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

And notice that God goes out of His way to remove the calculation. He names the smallness on purpose. He says fewest, out loud, so that nobody can build the explanation you have been building for forty years.

So the arithmetic has not been humility. You have been chosen out of love rather than out of a shortage, and the loving is the whole of the reason. The word settled that before there was a wedding to read at, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the car with you while you read this.

The calculation always finds an answer, and that is what is wrong with it

Here is what makes this so hard to escape, and it is worth naming precisely.

The arithmetic always works. There is always somebody who was busy, always a reason that is technically available, and because the reason is technically available you conclude it is the real one. But a reason you can construct is not a reason anybody used.

You have never once asked your niece why she asked you. You have decided on her behalf, and you have decided against yourself, and you have called it realism.

That is not pride and I am not calling it anything of the kind. Nobody is being diagnosed. It is a defense against being wanted, and defenses like that are usually old and were usually built for something.

But look at the cost. Your niece said yes when she meant it and you gave her a technicality back. Everybody who has ever chosen you has had the choosing quietly overturned in a car afterward.

You have been wanted rather than settled for, and the wanting is already the case whether or not you can feel it in the driver's seat. Deuteronomy 7 says because the Lord loved you; His Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off the page and puts it where a man's arithmetic runs.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot be chosen is that somebody near you punishes you for taking up space, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.