I Called It Servanthood

The public praise is the part that makes it hard to explain to anybody.

Twice a year, from the front, his name is said with warmth. A man with a servant heart. Somebody who never needs to be asked. And people mean it, and afterward people say kind things to him at the door, and he goes home and cannot work out why he feels the way he feels.

Five years.

It is not the workload. He would tell you that first and he would be right. He has never minded the hours and he does not want thanks.

It is the other thing, the thing that happens in the office on Tuesdays, which has no name and which he has never described to a living soul.

A tone. A way of receiving what he has done that manages to be about what he has not done. A habit of raising something he got wrong four years ago in a conversation where it does not belong. And a particular silence, after he has spoken, of about two seconds, which is long enough to communicate everything and short enough to be nothing you could report.

He has lost about fifteen pounds. He puts it down to being busy.

If you have been praised in public for something that is being done to you in private, this article is for you, and I am going to be plain.

What a bruised reed tells you

Let me say it without one word of hedging.

Servanthood is real and it is beautiful and it is the shape of Christ, and this page is not going to take it off you. You have it and you have had it for years, and none of what follows is a suggestion that you should serve less.

But servanthood is a thing a man gives. What is happening on Tuesdays is a thing being taken, and the words are not interchangeable, and it is the praise from the front that has kept them tangled for five years.

Now read what is said about the servant in Isaiah, and notice what it tells you about God's disposition toward somebody who is nearly done.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

A reed already bruised. Flax already down to smoke and no flame. Those are pictures of somebody at the end of it, and the promise is that He will not finish what is already nearly finished.

That is His disposition toward a person in your condition. Not that He will get the last useful thing out of you before you go. That He will not press.

You are a bruised reed He has promised not to break, and the promise is about His conduct toward you rather than about your usefulness. That is not my kindness to you. It is written in Isaiah 42:3, 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 now the question that follows, and it is the only question this page really asks: what is being done to the reed, and who is doing it?

So five years of calling it servanthood has not been humility. You have a dignity God gave and no role can spend, and it is intact this evening. The word settled that before you took the role, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the office while you read this.

Why the public praise makes it worse

Here is the mechanism, and naming it may be the most useful thing on this page.

If he were unkind in public and unkind in private you would have left three years ago, or somebody would have noticed and asked, and either way you would not be alone with it.

The praise is what makes it unspeakable. Because now, if you say anything, you are the man who is complaining about somebody who says warm things about him from the front, and everybody in that building has heard the warm things and nobody has been in the office on a Tuesday.

So you have nowhere to put it, and the nowhere is not accidental.

I want to be careful. I am not telling you the man is calculating. He may not be. Some people are warm in public and corrosive in private without ever having decided to be, and never once look at the gap.

But the effect on you does not depend on his intentions. You have lost a stone and you cannot describe your own Tuesdays and you have not told a living soul in five years, and those three facts sit there regardless of what is going on inside him.

You have permission to describe what happens on a Tuesday, and describing it is not disloyalty. Isaiah 42 shows God refusing to press on somebody already bruised; His Spirit is the one who lets a man see what is being done to him without any of it becoming his fault.

Now, plainly, and this is the part of this page that matters most. Nothing here is telling you to resign, and nothing here is telling you to stay. I do not know your family, your housing, your history in that church, or what either choice would cost you, and a page that issued you an instruction would be pretending to a knowledge it does not have. That is yours, and it belongs to the people who actually know your life, and to God.

What can be said is that you are allowed to tell somebody who can act: another elder, a trustee, a denominational officer, a counselor, a friend outside that building. And if any of this has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today: in the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.