I Am The One Who Drives People Home

There are four of them who cannot get there on their own and he does all four.

It works out at about seventy minutes on a Sunday, split either side, and about the same again on a Wednesday when there is a thing on. He has been doing it since 2011. He has a route. He does the furthest one first on the way out and last on the way back, for reasons involving a level crossing.

And what that means, in practice, is that he arrives after the beginning and leaves before the end.

Every time. Fourteen years.

If something happens in that building, he is either in the car park with the engine running or eleven minutes down the road, and he hears about it afterwards from somebody who was there, in the way you hear about weather in another county.

He is not resentful. He does not want anybody to feel bad and he would stop this article right here if he thought it was going to make one of those four feel like a burden, because they are not, and one of them is the best conversation of his week.

But on the way back last Sunday, with the car empty, he used a phrase in his own head that he had never used before, and it has been with him since.

Support staff.

That is what he called himself. Not bitterly. Almost administratively. The people in that room have an encounter and somebody has to make the encounter possible, and he is the somebody, and it is fine, and that is what he is.

And that is you with the engine running, or you would not still be reading.

What the word manifestation is attached to

Let me put one verse down and then look very carefully at where it points.

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.1 Corinthians 12:7

Three things in that sentence and every one of them matters to a man in a car park.

To each. Not to some. Not to the ones in the room at the right moment.

Is given. Past tense, done, not pending.

For the common good. This is the one I want you to sit with, because it changes the direction of the whole thing. The manifestation is not given so that the person having it has an experience. It is given for the common good, which means it points outward from the person it lands on toward everybody else.

You are inside the words to each, and the giving happened rather than being scheduled. It is written that to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7). The Holy Spirit distributes toward the common good, and a car with four people in it on a Sunday morning is about as common a good as exists.

Now I am going to be careful here, because there is a cheap move available and I am not going to make it.

The cheap move is to tell you the lift is secretly the real ministry and the people inside are having the shallow version. That is flattery and it is also nonsense, and you would see through it before you got to the end of the sentence.

What happens in that building is real. Those four people are getting something in there that matters, which is precisely why you drive seventy minutes to make sure they can.

Here is the actual correction, and it is narrower.

You have accepted a two tier arrangement that Paul spends an entire chapter dismantling, and support staff is not a category in it. It is written that the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you (1 Corinthians 12:21), and Paul writes that in the middle of a passage that also forbids the hand saying it about itself. The Holy Spirit does not run a room with participants and facilitators.

And there is one more thing, and it is about the fourteen years.

You have been reading your position in the building as your position in the body. Those are not the same map. One of them is about a level crossing and a route and who cannot drive. The other one is about apportioning, and Paul says explicitly who does it and it is not the rota.

You are apportioned to by the Holy Spirit rather than by the timetable. It is written that all these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as He wills (1 Corinthians 12:11). The Holy Spirit is not restricted to the parts of a Sunday you are physically present for.