The Church Down The Road

Forty people, and he could name every one of them, including the two who come once a month and the man at the back who has never given his surname to anybody.

There are nine chairs stacked at the side that they put out for Easter and Christmas and did not need this year, and he has thought about those nine chairs more than he would like to admit.

Four miles away there is a church with four hundred. He has nothing against them. The man who leads it is decent and once drove out here on a Tuesday in the rain to sit with him after a funeral, and did not mention his own building once.

It is not envy. It is quieter than envy and it goes deeper. It is arithmetic. Four hundred, forty, and a number he cannot stop doing in his head at about eleven at night.

Somebody at a regional meeting asked him where he serves, and he said the name, and then he said it. Small place. Very small. You will not have heard of it. Then he laughed, and moved the conversation on quickly.

And driving home, the small drop. It has been happening so long that he stopped giving it a name, because naming it would sound like fishing.

If you have a sentence you say about yourself in a room full of other people, the one that gets out before you have decided, then you know the drop. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you the sentence is not humility.

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

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting a very long time for anybody to say it out loud.

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 it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact about that, because nothing else gets in 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 the aiming to be ashamed of.

Now read what Scripture actually says about the arithmetic you have been running at eleven at night, and notice how blunt it is.

For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.2 Corinthians 10:12

Are not wise. That is Paul's verdict on the whole exercise, and he does not aim it only at the man who comes out on top of the comparison. He aims it at the comparison. You have been running a calculation Scripture calls unwise, and stopping it is obedience rather than a loss of perspective. That is not my opinion about your Tuesday nights. It is written in 2 Corinthians 10:12, 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.

Read the next verse and it gets more pointed. Paul says he will boast only within the measure God assigned him, the field God apportioned. There is a field with your name on it, and its boundary was drawn by God, and the size of the field four miles away is not on your map at all.

So the shrinking has not been humility. You have a field that was measured out and given to you, and forty people standing in it are the whole of what you are answerable for. The word settled that before you took the church, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the car with you while you read this.

A ruler with somebody else on it is not a ruler

Here is what comparison actually does to a man, and it is worth being precise, because it does not feel like sin. It feels like realism.

Comparison replaces the measure with a difference. And a difference is not a measure of anything. It cannot tell you whether the work is good, whether the people are fed, whether the man at the back has anybody else in the world. It can only tell you a gap, and a gap has no information in it about you.

Anybody who has ever kept accounts knows what happens next. A figure written up beyond its worth is a false entry. A figure 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 your own work, and you were never asked for an inaccurate one. The written word tells you the field was apportioned, and His Spirit is what makes a man able to look straight at forty names without flinching in either direction.

And nothing here is handing you self-promotion instead. I am careful about that, because a man who has been shrinking for years is not helped by being told to start inflating. 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 man standing at his true measure in front of a God who is immeasurably larger, and knowing exactly which of the two of them is which.

You can be at full height and bowed. In fact that is the only way it works, because a man already crouching has nowhere further down to go.

One plain word before we move on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep yourself small 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.