Precious Was The Word, And He Said It First

They close the road for it, which takes a form and a committee and a woman called Bev who has been doing the form for eleven years.

One table all the way down the middle. Everybody brings something. There is a man with a speaker and a genuinely alarming amount of extension cord.

Warm evening, the light going amber down between the houses.

She is forty-eight.

For twenty years she was the one who ran this. Not officially. There is no title. She was the one who knew who had a table, who to ask about the bunting, which neighbor to speak to first so the others would say yes, and how to get the road closed without anybody falling out about it.

This year she came at seven and sat down on a chair somebody put out for her, and she has been sitting on it since.

She is not being left out. It is worse than that: people keep coming over. They are lovely. Somebody brought her a plate. Bev came and sat with her for ten minutes and told her about the form.

And what she cannot say to any of them, on a warm evening in a street she organized for twenty years, is this: I do not know what I am for now.

Not what I do. What I am for. She has been the useful one since she was nineteen years old, and useful is not one of the things she did, it is the whole word she used about herself.

If usefulness has been taken off you, you know that question, and you know that being handed a plate does not answer it.

He chose a word with no function in it

Weigh it first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the organizing. It is the noun. It costs you the word you have used about yourself for twenty-nine years, and there is no replacement in the language you were raised on. It costs the twenty years, in the sense that the street runs without you and runs well, which is the correct outcome and is not a comfort. It costs the chair somebody put out. And it costs you a question that arrives on a lovely evening while people who love you keep coming over, and that none of them could answer if you asked it.

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 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 I do not know what I am for has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the street would be no different without a chair out for you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, Bev, one of the ones who keeps coming over, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who put a chair out and then come and sit on the next one.

Now, Isaiah 43, and read the word God chooses and think about all the words He did not.

Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee.Isaiah 43:4

Precious.

He is speaking to a nation that had comprehensively failed at every function it was given. They were supposed to keep a covenant and they did not, they were supposed to be a light and they were not, and by any measure of usefulness the whole project had produced very little that anybody could point at.

And when God comes to say why He acts for them, He does not reach for a functional word. He does not say: since you were useful to me. Since you were productive. Since you performed. He says precious, which is a word about worth held by the one looking, and it has no function in it anywhere.

You are described with a word that has nothing to do with what you can still do. Isaiah 43:4 says precious in my sight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken to a failed nation and lays it on a chair in a closed road.

Now, the order of the verse, because that is where the argument is. Since thou wast precious, then the rest follows. Precious is the first term, and the loving is stated after it, and there is no clause anywhere in that sentence about output.

Which means God is not making an exception for you because you are unwell. He is using the ordinary word He always used, and you have simply been translating it into your own language for twenty-nine years and losing it in the translation.

You have never been valued on the basis you have been valuing yourself on. That is written into Isaiah 43:4, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an old word land on a woman with a plate she did not ask for.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a whole evening of lovely things has already been said in that street.

It does not tell you that you will find a new way to be useful. Maybe you will and maybe you will not, and I am not going to predict it, because what God does with your body and your capacity is His, in His own way.

And I am not going to hand you a hidden usefulness. I am not going to tell you that your presence is a ministry or that sitting there is a service, because that is the same word with the goalposts moved, and it would leave you being measured by exactly the thing that has been taken.

You were never required to be for something in order to be precious. Scripture puts precious first and loved after it with no function between them, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it down a closed road on a warm evening.