She Has Been Taught By Everybody And Known By No One

She could give you a decent forty minutes on grace with no notes.

That is not a boast and she would be uncomfortable if it sounded like one. It is simply true, and it is the result of about eleven years of being taught by people who were good at teaching, in rooms, in podcasts, in three conferences she saved up for and one she still thinks about.

She has notes. She has systems. She has a way of reading a chapter that she developed herself and that works.

And she noticed something in April, in a supermarket car park of all places, and she has not been able to unnotice it since.

Nobody could describe her week.

Not a single person. If you took the eleven people she would call her closest and asked each of them what she has actually been doing since Monday, or what she is worried about at the moment, or what she does with a Saturday, every one of them would be guessing.

They know her opinions. Several of them know her opinions extremely well and would enjoy arguing with her about two of them.

Nobody knows her Thursday.

And what has arrived since April is not self pity. She would refuse that word and she would be right to. It is more like an audit finding: she has spent eleven years receiving excellent information and has arrived at thirty-eight with a great deal in her head and nobody who could tell you what her house smells like.

She has been to eleven years of things where she sat in a room and was addressed, along with everybody else, by somebody at the front.

Addressed, but never spoken to.

And she cannot see anything wrong with any of it. Every one of those teachers was good and honest and most of them would be pleased to see her. Nothing failed. That is the strangest part: nothing failed and here she is.

And you have the same gap. You know a great deal, and nobody could describe your week, and you noticed it once somewhere ordinary and have not been able to put it down since.

He calls his own sheep by name

There is a description in John ten that is easy to sentimentalize and much sharper than it looks.

To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.John 10:3

By name.

Not to the flock. Not a general address to everybody in the pen, which is what a shepherd calling a whole flock would naturally be. The picture is of a man going into a pen where several flocks are mixed and calling individual animals by their individual names, and his own coming out to him.

That is a very specific claim about how God deals with a person, and it is the exact opposite of what has been happening to you for eleven years.

You are called by name and you always have been, and it is not a general announcement to a room. It is written that He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out (John 10:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that individual rather than institutional, which is a difference a person can feel the moment they notice it.

Now the audit finding, because it deserves to be taken as seriously as you have taken it.

Eleven years of excellent information and nobody who could describe her week.

That is not a failure of your teachers and you have already worked that out. A person at the front of a room is addressing a room. That is the job and they did it well, and none of them was ever in a position to know your Thursday, and it would be strange to expect otherwise.

The finding is not about them. The finding is that being taught and being known are two different goods, and you have received a great deal of the first and almost none of the second, and nobody ever told you they were different things.

You have been receiving one good thing and quietly assuming it was the other one. Scripture says knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a well taught woman from mistaking a full head for a known life, which is the exact distinction you made in a car park in April.

And the eleven people who would be guessing.

That is worth holding gently. They are not neglectful and they are not shallow. Most friendships between busy adults run on opinions and news, and almost nobody in any life gets asked about a Thursday, and the reason you noticed it is that you are unusually observant rather than unusually unloved.

You are not less loved than you thought, you have simply seen how little of a person most love ever gets to see. It is written that the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been looking at the parts of you no arrangement of human friendship has ever been shaped to reach.

And now the thing this page will not do, and it is important.

It is not going to tell you to be more vulnerable, or to open up, or to find one person and go deeper. You are thirty-eight and you know all of that, and being handed it as advice would make the whole thing your project to fix, which it is not.

You are being told about a knowing that already exists rather than being sent to construct one. Scripture says the Lord knows those who are His (2 Timothy 2:19), and it is His Spirit who is how being known is actually experienced, which is available in a supermarket car park with nobody else present.

And one thing about the smell of your house, because you chose that image yourself.

That is the right image and it is not trivial. It is the kind of thing only somebody who is regularly in a place knows, and it cannot be told to anybody, and it is exactly the register of knowledge you have been missing.

You are known at that register by Somebody who has been in the house the whole time. It is written that You search out my path and my lying down (Psalm 139:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient line about ordinary movements land in a woman with eleven years of conference notes.