Fellowship Is Not A Grade

The old chapel wall runs along the top of the field and the grass at the base of it is long enough to sit in, which people do in the evening because the stone holds the heat.

Two of them up there. Neither is in a hurry to say anything.

He is fifty.

Seven years, and it is the kind that has bad days and worse days and a small number of days when he can nearly forget, and the nearly is its own particular cruelty.

And there is a phrase that has been in him since a man said it to him in the second year, kindly, in a parking lot after a service.

The fellowship of His sufferings.

It is a real phrase and it is in the Bible and the man was not wrong to say it. What it did, though, over about five years, is turn into a test.

Because if his suffering is fellowship with Christ, then how he suffers is the measure of the fellowship. A bad week is a poor showing. Complaining is a withdrawal. Wanting it to stop is a failure to participate properly. And so the worst days, which are the days he has the least of everything, have become the days on which he is most aware of falling short of a standard he cannot even name properly.

If a phrase has become a test for you, you know it happened slowly, and you know the man who gave it to you meant it as a comfort.

Read what he asks for and who does the sharing

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the seven years, though the nearly days are their own particular cruelty. It is the grading. It costs you the worst days twice over: once for what they are, and once for what you have decided they say about you. It costs the phrase, which is real and which is now a stone. It costs you complaint, which is a normal human function and which you have ruled out. And it costs you a standard you cannot state, which is the worst kind, because a standard you cannot state is one you can never satisfy.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your seven years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the worst days have taken you somewhere darker, tell one living person today. Your doctor, whoever is sitting in the grass beside you, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who sit against a warm wall and do not need conversation.

Now, Philippians 3, and read what Paul is actually doing in the sentence.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.Philippians 3:10

That I may know him.

The sentence is a request. Paul is asking for something, and the thing he asks for first and governs the whole line with is a person. Everything after it is unpacking what knowing that person involves.

He is not describing a qualification and he is not setting a standard. He is praying, in the first person, for a knowing that includes sharing in what happened to Christ.

You are inside a prayer rather than in front of a test. Philippians 3:10 is a request to know Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one Paul names in the same letter as the one Christians worship by.

Now the word fellowship, because that is the word doing the damage. In that language it is the ordinary word for sharing something in common, the word used for a partnership, for a shared meal, for money held in common between people. It is a word about a thing being had together.

It is not a word about performance. There is no version of it in which the quality of your participation is what makes it a sharing. Two people sharing a table are sharing it whether one of them is enjoying the meal or not.

You have a sharing that was never conditional on the quality of your part in it. That is written into Philippians 3:10, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a common word land on a man sitting against a warm wall.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because five years of good things have already been said about that phrase.

It does not tell you the seven years are ending, and it makes no promise about your body, and I will not predict it, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not make the suffering a preparation you are being marked on. Philippians 3:10 has no curriculum in it and no grade attached to how anybody bears anything, and the Holy Spirit has never handed anybody a mark sheet. Paul is asking to know a person, and the sharing is described as part of the knowing rather than as a performance that qualifies for it.

And it does not tell you the man in the parking lot was wrong. He gave you a true phrase in a form that turned into a test over five years, which is a thing that happens to true phrases.

You were never being marked on your conduct inside a sharing. Scripture makes it a request to know a person, and the same Spirit who is named in that letter is the one who carries it into long grass at the base of an old wall.