The One Nobody Would Pick

Two captains, a football, a line of children on the grass, and a system every one of them understands without anybody ever having explained it.

The line gets shorter. That is the whole mechanism. It gets shorter and the children left in it start doing arithmetic that no eight year old should be able to do this fast: nine of us left, seven picks to go, so two are going to be standing here at the end when the shouting starts.

Louise is doing that arithmetic. She is doing it every Tuesday and every Thursday from the age of six to the age of eleven, and she gets very good at it, and by nine she has developed the technique that will follow her for the next four decades. She starts looking bored. She turns slightly away, and looks at the trees at the edge of the field, so that when the last name is called it can look as though she had not been listening anyway.

That is the skill. Not the football. The looking away.

She is forty seven now and she still has it, and it works beautifully. She leaves gatherings first, cheerfully, before anybody can drift off. She says she is fine on her own and means it about sixty percent of the time. She never asks whether she is invited to a thing; she works it out sideways so that a no does not have to be said out loud to her face. She has built a whole clean, functional, well managed life around never once being the last one standing on the grass.

You know this. Maybe your field was a lunch hall, or a family, or a group of cousins who had a thing you were adjacent to. Whatever the shape of it, you learned early to decline before you could be declined, and now you can do it without even noticing you have done it.

So let me tell you about a servant walking out of a palace with a name written on his errand, because there is a scene here that undoes the arithmetic entirely.

A new king has just come to the throne, and he asks a question that makes his court go still. Is there anybody left of the old royal house, he says, so that I can show kindness to them.

And there is. There is one. A grandson of the previous king, dropped by a nurse in the panic of the day the dynasty fell, lame in both feet since he was five years old, living in a place so obscure that its name means the back of beyond. He has spent his whole adult life not being found, because in that world the grandson of a fallen king is the first person a new king removes.

The servant goes and gets him anyway. Brings him back on the road he has been avoiding his entire life, to the palace, to the throne room, to the very floor where the arithmetic runs fastest.

And the king says: do not be afraid. I am going to show you kindness for Jonathan your father's sake, and you will eat at my table always.

Not because of what he was. Not because of what he could offer, which was nothing, and everybody in that room could see the nothing. For the sake of somebody else, who had cut an oath with the king on a hillside years before, and the oath was still standing after the man who cut it had died.

The kindness was not charity, it was an oath being kept

Here is where people flinch, so let us handle it straight away.

If you read that scene as a powerful man taking pity on a broken one, you will read your own life as a favor you must not wear out. That is not what happened in that throne room. David was not being generous. He was doing what an oath obliged him to do, and he had been looking for somebody to do it for. What was crossing that floor was not generosity at all. It was loyalty owed under an oath, and nobody begs their way into that and nobody is put out of it for being unimpressive.

The man who came up that road was not a beggar being fed. He was a claimant, and the claim was good, and it was not his own.

You are inside a kindness of that kind, and you were inside it before anyone at any table looked up. Second Samuel 9:7 has the king saying for your father's sake and the man saying nothing at all in his own defense, and the Holy Spirit takes that throne room and stands it in a life where somebody once learned to look at the trees.

While nothing had yet been put right

Now the sentence in Scripture that this whole thing turns on, and read it slowly because the timing in it is everything.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While. Not after. Not once we had cleaned it up and become the kind of person somebody would pick. The love was commended, put on public display like a case being made, at the point when nothing whatsoever had been put right.

You have been picked at the worst possible moment for your case and it went through anyway, and that is what is written, in that order, on purpose. His Spirit is not waiting for you to become more selectable before that verse applies to you, because the verse describes a decision made when you were at your least selectable and made anyway.

For whose sake, and the trap in that question

And here is the thing that keeps a person from becoming a charity case in their own head.

Everybody at that king's table was there for somebody else's sake. Every single one. Not one of them was seated on merit, and the ones who thought they were had simply forgotten who put their family in the room. The difference between the lame grandson and the confident son at the far end of the table was not the quality of their claim; it was that one of them knew what his claim rested on.

So when you look at the people you have quietly ranked above yourself, the ones who seem to belong easily, hear this: they are in for the sake of Christ, exactly and only as you are. There is no first class carriage in this. The reason for everyone in the room is the same reason, and it has a name, and the name is not yours or theirs.

You are not being tolerated. You were sent for, by a King who asked a question about you first, and the written word says the love was commended while the case was still terrible, and the Spirit of God is making that specific to a woman who is very good at looking at trees.