It Will Cost The Church Something

She did the arithmetic at about midnight in March, on a piece of paper, and then she tore the piece of paper up, and she has been carrying the number in her head ever since.

Here is the situation, without the details, because the details are hers and the shape is what matters.

There is a thing she believes to be true and believes she should teach, and it is not a fringe thing and it is not a personal opinion. If she teaches it, three specific consequences follow, and she has thought about each of them so many times that they have worn grooves.

One of them is relational and she can carry it.

One of them is about her own standing in a network she has been part of for fourteen years, and she can probably carry that too, and has surprised herself by how little it now weighs.

And one of them is a number. It is a real number attached to real people who give generously and in good conscience out of genuine love for that church, and who would find what she has to say hard, and who would be entirely within their rights to go elsewhere, and if they did the effect on that building's ability to do what it does would be immediate and would land on other people.

That is the arithmetic. That is the whole of it, and it is not a scandal and nobody in it is a villain, and it is why she has not slept properly since March.

She has also noticed something she does not like, and it is the reason she is reading this. She has started to be unable to tell the difference between prudence and fear.

Because both of them say the same thing. Both say wait. Both produce excellent reasons. Both sound wise at midnight. And she has been listening to a voice for five months that she cannot identify, and she has begun to suspect that she has been calling it wisdom because the alternative is a word she does not want to apply to herself.

What they asked for, and what they did not

There is a prayer in Acts prayed by people who had just been threatened by the authorities, and it is worth reading for what is missing from it.

Peter and John have been arrested, questioned, and released with a warning. They go back to their own company and report it, and the church prays, and this is what comes out of them.

And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word.Acts 4:29

Two halves and both matter.

The first half is: behold their threatenings. They name it. Out loud. To God. They do not minimize it, they do not spiritualize it, and they do not pretend that being threatened by the ruling council of their nation is a small thing. They put the actual threat on the table in front of God as the first act of the prayer.

The second half is what they ask for, and it is not what people expect. They do not ask for the threat to be removed. They do not ask for protection, or for the council to change its mind, or for the consequences to be lifted.

They ask for boldness, and they leave the situation exactly as it is.

So hear this, sitting up at midnight with a number in your head: naming the cost is not faithlessness, it is the first line of the prayer. That is not my reassurance; it is what His word records the early church actually doing, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an ancient prayer meeting and makes it usable to a woman in March.

Now let me get at the thing you cannot tell apart, because I think it can be told apart, and there is a test.

Prudence and fear both say wait. That is true, and it is why five months have not resolved anything.

But they differ in one respect and it is observable. Prudence has a condition attached. It says wait, and then it says what it is waiting for: until the trustees have met, until that family's situation settles, until I have taken counsel from somebody who knows more than I do. It names a thing that would change the answer.

Fear has no condition. It says wait, and when you ask what it is waiting for it produces a new reason, and then another, and the reasons rotate, and none of them is ever the last one.

You can test the voice you have been listening to. Ask it, tonight, what would have to be true for the answer to change. If it can tell you, it is prudence and you may trust it. If it changes the subject, you have your answer, and you have it without having to call yourself anything.

And now the part I am not going to do.

I am not going to tell you to teach it. Not this month, not at all, and there is no paragraph coming where holding it turns out to be disobedience. That decision belongs to you and to God and to a room I have never stood in.

What I will say is that the prayer is available tonight regardless of what you decide, and that it is a prayer for the speaker and not for the circumstances. His word has them asking for boldness while leaving the threat entirely untouched, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives that, in His own way, to people who have named the cost honestly first.

And one more thing, because it is the piece you have been carrying alone. The number is not yours to be ashamed of. You did not invent those consequences and you are not the reason they exist, and a shepherd who counts what a decision will cost other people is doing exactly what a shepherd is for.