I Just Keep The Cattle

He has the dates written down in a notebook in the truck.

Eleven months of them. Not a diary, nothing dramatic, just dates and a word or two, because on the second occasion he thought: I should write this down, and that thought has turned out to be the most important one he has had in a year.

He is not going to describe what he saw here and you do not need it. It was wrong. It is the kind of wrong that has a person on the other end of it who does not know, and it has continued because everybody who might say something is in the same position he is.

He has said nothing.

He has a good reason and he has rehearsed it plenty: he has no title. He is not management, he did not go to school for it, he came in on a Tuesday nine years ago and stayed. Who would he be to walk into an office and make an accusation.

And underneath that, closer to the bone, is the other one: a man who does that is a man who thinks he is important, and where he comes from, that is the worst thing you can be.

So he writes down dates and keeps his head down and calls it humility.

If you have a notebook of your own, you know exactly what I mean.

The qualifications God went with

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting eleven months for anybody to say it.

Silence is not automatically humility. Sometimes it is, and there is a good quiet that comes from having nothing to prove. But a silence kept because you have no title is a silence about your standing, not about God, and those two get confused constantly.

Now read what a man said when he was told to stop prophesying and go home, because it is the plainest answer to your objection in the whole book.

Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit: And the LORD took me as I followed the flock, and the LORD said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.Amos 7:14

He does not defend his qualifications. He agrees with the accusation and then he keeps going.

Notice the structure of it. I was nobody. I kept animals and picked figs. And the Lord took me from behind the flock and said go.

The lack of standing is not an obstacle he overcame. It is part of his answer, stated plainly, and then he says the thing that actually matters, which is who sent him.

You have been taken from behind the flock, and the sending never once ran through a title. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Amos 7:14, 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.

So eleven months of the notebook has not been humility. You are the one who saw it, and that is the qualification, and it was handed to you rather than claimed. The word settled that long before you came in on a Tuesday, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the truck while you read this.

What the second reason is actually made of

Here is the one under the first, and it is worth handling gently because you were taught it by people who loved you.

Where you come from, a man who puts himself forward is the worst thing there is. That is a real instruction and it built most of what is good in you. Keep it.

But look at what it is being used for now. It is not stopping you from bragging. It is stopping you from saying that something is happening to somebody who does not know it is happening.

That is not the same act, and the instruction was never written for it. Nobody who taught you not to put yourself forward meant: and therefore let a wrong thing run for a year.

And there is a plain fact worth sitting with. You have eleven months of dates. Whatever you eventually decide to do with them, and this page is not going to tell you what that is, the notebook exists, and it exists because some part of you has known since the second occasion that this was going to require something of you.

You have permission to say what you saw, and the permission does not come from a title. Amos 7:14 has him naming his own lack of standing and speaking anyway; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to say a plain sentence in a room where he has no rank.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If any part of what you have seen involves somebody being harmed, nothing here is asking anybody to absorb that, and telling somebody who can act is the right instinct rather than a failure of humility. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if anybody is in danger right now, use your emergency number.