I Counted Everyone But Me

Marcus Deel counted the room for eleven years and nobody ever asked him to start.

A woman named Dot Ferriday had done it before him, on half sheets of paper cut from a legal pad, and when she died the wooden box by the inside door sat empty for three Sundays. It bothered him more than he could account for. On the fourth Sunday he cut a legal pad in half at his kitchen table, took a slip in his coat pocket, and counted.

He counted from the back. Always from the back, so nobody would see him doing it, because being seen counting felt to him like being seen taking a temperature.

Then he folded the slip once and dropped it in the box on his way out.

Five hundred and some Sundays. Nobody thanked him. Nobody mentioned it in nine years, and here is the thing to say straight: nobody was wrong not to. A room full of people cannot see every hand at work in it. That is not a defect in the room, it is what a room is.

He told himself it was fine, and he half meant it. The other half kept a quiet account, the way people do.

In November he went into the hospital for eleven days over a hip that had been arguing with him since spring. It was not dramatic. He was walking by the third week and cross about the walker.

The first Sunday back he came in the side door and opened the wooden box out of pure habit.

Two slips in there in a hand he did not know. Small, slanted, a woman's writing or a careful man's.

The numbers were right.

He knew they were right because after eleven years he could stand at the back and read a room to within four, and both slips landed exactly where he would have put them.

He stood by the door with two pieces of paper in his hand while people went past him saying good morning.

That afternoon he did something he had never done, which was take the whole box home. He put it on the kitchen table and went through eleven years of slips, oldest first, flattening the folds with the side of his thumb.

Somewhere in the fourth year he stopped.

He had counted from the back. Every week, for eleven years, from the back of the room, which meant he had counted the room in front of him.

Five hundred and some slips. Not one of them had him in it.

Marcus Deel sat at his kitchen table with a hip that hurt and a box of paper in front of him and understood that his own count had been off by exactly one every single Sunday for eleven years, and that it had been the same one every time.

Set in the body, every one of them

Paul is writing to a church that is arguing about which parts of it matter, and he says something about how the parts got there in the first place.

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

Three things in that sentence, and every one of them takes something out of your hands.

God set. The verb is finished action. It is not a process, it is not under review, and the one who did it is named. No committee placed you and no attendance figure placed you. You were set, and the setting is done, and it was God who did it. That is not my encouragement; it is what the written word says happened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the placing in the body, which is precisely why nobody in the building has the authority to unplace you.

Every one of them. Paul does not write "the important ones" or "the ones the morning would notice." He writes every one, and a scribe learns early that when a text goes out of its way to say every, it is answering somebody who was quietly excluding himself.

As it hath pleased him. The pleasure is God's. Not the roster's, not the room's, and not the outcome's. Whether your absence changes a Sunday is a fact about a Sunday. It is not a fact about a placement God made because it pleased Him to make it.

Now look three verses earlier, because Paul saw this exact reasoning coming.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

Read the foot's argument. It is airtight. The foot is genuinely not the hand. The foot has correctly observed that it does not do what the hand does, and everything it says about itself is accurate.

And it is wrong. Not about the facts. About what the facts mean.

You ran the experiment correctly and it answered a question God never asked. Eleven days away, the room ran, the numbers came out right, and every bit of that is true. The word of God simply never once tied your membership to your effect, and the Holy Spirit who set you there did not ask the room's opinion before He did it.

There is a kind of measurement that is exact and pointed at nothing. A thermometer in a room can tell you the temperature to a tenth of a degree and cannot tell you whether anyone is welcome in it. The measurement was never the wrong measurement. It was the wrong instrument for the question you were actually asking.

And here is the question you were actually asking, because it was never really about the count. It was am I of this body. Scripture answers that one directly and does not go near attendance to do it: God set the members, every one, as it pleased Him, and the Holy Spirit bears witness to it in a person rather than announcing it from a platform.

Now let me say the rest to you and not about him, because the man at the kitchen table is you.

You know the room. You know the thing you do that nobody has mentioned in years, and you know the eleven days, or the six weeks, or the season when you found out what happens without you, and what happens is that it is fine.

And you have been carrying the conclusion ever since, quietly, without saying it to anybody, because saying it out loud sounds like fishing.

That conclusion has no standing over you and it never had any. The written word says you were set there by God because it pleased Him, and the Holy Spirit does not revise a placement downward on the evidence of one November.