I Am the One Who Takes the Notes

Every Wednesday, seven o'clock, eleven people and a notebook.

He is very good at it. He asks the question that opens the room. He notices who has not spoken and makes the space without making a thing of it. And when somebody says I think God might be saying, he writes it down, with the date, in a hand that has got neater over four years, and afterwards he types it up and sends it round.

There are two hundred and nine entries in that notebook.

He can tell you which of them came true and which of them nobody ever mentioned again. He can tell you who tends to hear about timing and who tends to hear about people. He has, without ever intending it, become the archivist of a room full of people who hear things.

Here is the entry he has never made, in four years of Wednesdays.

His own.

Not one. Two hundred and nine records of what God said to other people, and nothing at all under his own name, and nobody in that room has ever once noticed, because the person holding the pen is not somebody anybody thinks to ask.

He is not bitter about it. That would be simpler. He genuinely loves those eleven people and he would do the Wednesdays for another four years without complaining.

What he has started to feel, at about half nine when everybody has gone and he is stacking chairs, is that he has built a beautiful room for a conversation he is not in.

The old man gives away the one sentence

There is a scene in Samuel where a boy keeps hearing something and keeps getting it wrong, and the whole thing turns on a sentence an old man hands him.

Therefore Eli said unto Samuel, Go, lie down: and it shall be, if he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.1 Samuel 3:9

Look at who is in that room and what each of them has.

Eli is the professional. He is the priest, he knows the house, he understands exactly what is happening the third time it occurs, and he correctly diagnoses it. He has the training and the discernment and the vocabulary.

And it is not being said to Eli. It is being said to a boy who did not yet know the Lord, and Eli, to his enormous credit, does not compete with that for one second. He tells the boy what to say next.

But notice what Eli does not do, and Scripture never criticises him for it, and it is the saddest quiet detail in the chapter. He gives away the sentence and he does not say it himself.

You are able to say that sentence in your own name, and it has never once been reserved for the people you write down. That is what the word actually shows, not an idea I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One putting it in the mouth of a man who has been handing it to everybody else.

Holding the pen is not a spiritual position

Now let me say the thing plainly, because I do not think anybody has said it to you in four years.

Administering a room where God speaks is not the same as being spoken to, and the two get confused constantly, and the confusion is almost always invisible to everybody including the administrator.

You're close to it every single Wednesday. You handle the material. More of what God is saying in that group passes through you than through anybody else in it, and there is a way of being near a thing that quietly substitutes for having it.

That is not hypocrisy and it is not laziness. It is what happens to the person holding the pen.

And nothing about your service has ever put you further from His voice. Scripture has Him speaking to a boy with no standing in the room while the priest lay down the corridor, and the Holy Spirit does not skip the one who set out the chairs.

Say the sentence in your own name

Here is the practical piece, and it is one line long.

Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.

Say it about yourself. Out loud, on your own, not on a Wednesday and not in that hall. Say it in your car or your kitchen, with nobody to record it and nobody to type it up, and then be quiet for two minutes.

You have handed that sentence to eleven people over four years. Say it once with your own name behind it.

You are a servant who hears and not only a servant who writes, and both of those were always in the description. He promised that His own know His voice, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a sentence land when a man finally says it about himself.

And a plain word about the group: nothing here suggests you stop. Keep the notebook. It is a genuinely good work and those two hundred and nine entries have served people. Just stop being the only person in that room with no entry.