Ten to Six, and Nothing on the List

Wendell is sixty-eight and his feet find the floor at ten to six whether anybody wants them to or not.

Nine years will do that to a body. Nine years of the names coming through at night, sometimes three of them, sometimes eleven, and Wendell getting up in the dark, sitting in the same chair by the window with the streetlight coming through the blinds, and going down the list out loud, slowly, one name at a time, with a spiral notebook open on his knee.

He writes them small. Date on the left. A tick when he hears something came of it.

In February the church moved everything onto a new system. Somebody's daughter did the work over a weekend and did it well, pulling the contacts out of the membership records and rebuilding the groups from scratch. Wendell's number in those old records was the landline he gave them in 2009 and disconnected four years ago.

That is the whole story. There is no villain in it. A phone number sat in a field in a database and the field was right at the time and then it was not.

For the first three weeks he thought it was a quiet season. He has known quiet seasons. He prayed for the ones he could remember off the last few lists and he waited.

Then on a Sunday somebody asked him at the coffee table how Denise came through her surgery, and Wendell said, what surgery.

He did not make anything of it. He is not built that way, and he had no interest in making a young woman feel bad about a spreadsheet she gave up a weekend for. He said something warm about Denise and moved along and washed his cup out at the sink like he does.

But the following Thursday his feet hit the floor at ten to six anyway.

They did it Friday too, and Saturday, and every day since. He sits in the chair. He opens the notebook. There is a pen in the spiral and the page is clean and there are no names on it, because nobody's phone has his number in it any more.

And here is the thing he has not told a living soul, the thing that sits with him in that chair before the light comes up.

He has begun to wonder whether the nine years ever counted for anything at all, or whether he was simply a man who was on a list.

Somewhere there is a thing you used to be handed, and you are not handed it now.

A rotation. A key. A group chat. A job somebody used to text you about at nine at night. Nobody took it off you in a meeting. It just stopped arriving, and you have been too proud and too kind to ask, and you have started to run a quiet audit on nine years of your own life.

Members one of another

Somebody wrote a letter to a church in a loud, crowded, expensive city, full of people who had every reason to rank each other, and in the middle of it he says a thing so plain that it slides right past most people.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.Romans 12:5

Sit on that last phrase, because it is not the one you expect.

He does not say members of an organization. He does not say members of a congregation, or of a roster, or of a program. He says members one of another. You are not a member of a thing. You are a member of the people, and they are members of you, the way a hand belongs to a shoulder.

And that is a fact about anatomy, not a fact about administration.

So hear this in the chair at ten to six. You are attached. Not listed. Attached. A hand does not appear on a roster and a hand does not need to be re-added after a system migration; a hand is joined to a body and it stays joined while the body lives. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who joined you in, and He did not do it with a phone number.

Now let me deal with the three weeks, because I think that is where the wound actually is.

You have been quietly wondering whether the prayers went anywhere in those weeks when nobody had assigned you any. So let me tell you what happened to them.

They arrived. Every one of them. Heaven's routing has never once run off a membership export, and the God who has been in that chair with you for nine years was not sitting there on a Thursday morning saying, well, he is not on the current version. Scripture says the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, and it puts no clause in there about whether anybody downstairs knew he was praying, and the Holy Spirit was in that room helping you pray for people whose names you had to dig out of your own memory.

And I want to say something about the church too, since the church is standing in this story looking accidentally guilty.

Nobody did this to you. A young woman gave up a weekend to make something work better, and a field in a database held a number that used to be right. That is not neglect, that is Saturday. Nothing here asks you to raise it with anybody, to sit down with a pastor, to call a meeting, or to make one person feel small about a list. Maybe somebody fixes it next month and maybe nobody ever does, and that is genuinely not what I came to talk to you about.

Because look at what your own body did while your name was off the list.

Ten to six. Every morning. Nine years of obedience built a rhythm into a man's bones so deep that the machinery of an entire congregation could forget him and his feet would still hit the floor in the dark on time.

That is not habit and it is not sentiment. That is an office. What you carry is needed here, and it is needed whether or not it is scheduled, and it did not come from the church and cannot be revoked by the church, because the written word says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, and it is the Holy Spirit who wakes a sixty-eight-year-old man in the dark to stand in the gap for people who will never know his name.

You are not an attender who used to be useful. You are a working part of a living body.