Loved Apart From Useful

Somebody said something kind to him on Sunday and he took it apart in the car.

Not out of suspicion. He believed her. He simply could not leave it as a thing that had been said about him, so by the ring road he had turned it into a set of observations about the sermon, and by the time he was home it had become a note about what he should do differently next week.

That is the machine. Every warm word goes in one end and comes out the other as a task, and it has been running for so long that he does not experience it as a machine. He experiences it as being conscientious.

His wife asked him once, not unkindly, whether there was anything left of him that was not the job. He said of course, and then he could not think of an example, and he changed the subject, and she let him.

He is forty seven. He is good at this. And there is a tiredness in him that has nothing to do with hours, because it is not the work that is heavy. It is that every kind thing that comes toward him gets converted into more of it before it lands.

If you cannot find anywhere in yourself that is loved apart from being useful, you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you the converting is not humility.

What you were taught to guard against is not what is wrong here

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting years for anybody to say it out loud in a room you were standing in.

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 will land until it is said. You took an instruction from people you respected, 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 what Jesus says about the love you are actually inside, and pay attention to the measure He uses, because it is not a modest one.

As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.John 15:9

As the Father has loved Me. That is the standard. Not as much as a shepherd loves a difficult sheep, not as much as a foreman values a reliable man. As the Father loves the Son, which is a love with no beginning and no assessment anywhere in it.

You are loved with the love the Father has for the Son, and none of that love is a response to your week. That is not my reassurance. It is written in John 15:9, 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.

Then comes the instruction, and it is one word: continue. Abide. Stay in it. Not achieve it, not maintain it, not qualify for it again on Monday. Remain in a thing you are already in.

So converting every kind word into a task has not been humility. You have a place in that love that no performance opened and no performance can close, and it is yours before Sunday and after it. The word settled that before you had a role, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the car with you while you read this.

Usefulness is not the same as worth, and you know that about everybody but you

Here is the thing you would say to somebody else without hesitating.

If a man in your church came to you and said he could only find himself loved for what he produced, you would sit him down. You would tell him it was not true. You would probably be quite firm about it, and you would be right.

You would not say it to yourself, and the reason is not theological. The reason is that the machine is useful. As long as every kind word converts into a task, you never have to sit still and be regarded, and being regarded is the thing that frightens you.

That is not pride, and I am not calling it pride. Nobody is being diagnosed. It is a defense, and it is probably as old as you are.

But the cost is exact and you can feel it. A man who cannot receive is a man who is always spending and never resupplied, and he can go a long way on that, and then he cannot.

You are loved right now with nothing produced and nothing planned, and the love is not being weighed against anything. John 15 says as the Father loved Me, so I have loved you; His Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that out of the page and puts it in a man's chest on a ring road.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot stop producing is that somebody near you punishes you the moment you are not useful, 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.