Just A Helper

Eleven years of Sunday mornings and the room still smells the same: glue, orange squash, poster paint, and the particular dust that only comes off craft card.

She knows which child needs to be at the end of the table because the middle is too loud for him. She knows the four year old who will cry at the story if you do the wolf voice, and the seven year old who has been coming since she could walk and now runs the register with a clipboard because giving her the clipboard was the thing that stopped her running out the door.

She wrote the whole three year curriculum. She rewrote it twice. There are eleven adults on the schedule and she trained nine of them.

And this morning a new family came in, and the mother put out her hand and asked who runs this, and out it came, in the tone you would use to read out a phone number.

Oh, I am just a helper.

Then she went and got the glue sticks.

Nobody corrected her. Nobody ever does, because it is her sentence and everybody is used to it. And afterward, stacking chairs, there was the small drop, the one that has been happening so long she stopped giving it a name years ago, because naming it would feel like making something of herself.

If you have put a word in front of your own name and left it there long enough that you have started to believe it, you know the drop I am talking about. And you may never once have been told that the word is not humility.

Somebody gave you a definition and you have been loyal to it

I want to say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting years for anybody to say it out loud in a room you are in.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It never was. Whoever gave you that gave it to you meaning well, and it was wrong.

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

Now read what is actually written about how a body of people is put together, and read it like an inventory rather than a poem.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

God set them. Every one of them. As it pleased Him. You were placed in that room by God and not by a shortage of volunteers, and the placing was deliberate. That is not my encouragement to you. It is written in 1 Corinthians 12, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

Read the verses either side of it and you will find Paul arguing with exactly your sentence. He has a foot saying that because it is not a hand it is not part of the body, and he calls that reasoning wrong. Not humble. Wrong. The foot does not get to resign by describing itself downward, because the arranging was never the foot's to do.

So the word just, the one that has been sitting in front of your name for eleven years, has been quietly overruling an arrangement God made. You have a place in that body, given rather than borrowed, and describing it accurately is not the first step into pride. The word settled it before you volunteered, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the hall while you read this.

Sober judgment weighs in both directions

Here is what nearly everybody walks past. Where Scripture warns about thinking too highly of yourself, it says do not think more highly than you ought to think. Which means there is an amount you ought. Paul does not stop to defend it. He assumes you know, and he goes straight on to the real instruction, which is to think with sober judgment.

Sober is a weighing word. It is the word for a clear head over figures, and the whole point of a clear head over figures is accuracy in both directions. Anyone who has ever kept books for anybody knows it. A number written up beyond its worth is a false entry. A number written down below its worth is exactly the same false entry facing the other way. Both are wrong. Only one of them gets called modest.

You were never asked for a small account of yourself, and you were never asked for an inaccurate one. The word asks for sober, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to look at their own life without flinching in either direction.

And you are not being handed self-promotion instead. I am careful here, because a woman who has spent eleven years going down is not helped by being told to start going up. That is the same false entry the other way round, and it is just as tiring. Humility is not a size at all. It is a posture: a person standing at their true measure in front of a God who is immeasurably larger, and knowing perfectly well which of the two of them is which.

You can be at full height and bowed. That is in fact the only way it works, because a person already crouching has nowhere left to go down to.

One plain word before we go further, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep the word just in front of your name is that somebody near you makes you pay 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.