The Favor That Was Never a Favor

The hallway holds about forty people comfortably and about ninety on a normal Sunday, so getting from the sanctuary door to the parking lot takes Lena roughly nineteen minutes, and she has timed it.

She is caught twice before the coffee table. The first is easy, a woman asking whether the youth thing is at six or seven, and Lena knows because Lena always knows. The second one has her elbow.

"You're doing the flowers next week, right. I put you down."

It is said kindly. That is the part that takes a while to explain to anybody who was not there. Nobody is being unpleasant to her. Her elbow is being held the way you hold the elbow of somebody you are fond of. And the sentence has a period at the end of it where a question mark would go, and the answer is already inside the sentence, sitting there waiting for Lena to agree with it.

She says of course. She always says of course.

Here is the list, and it is not a complaint, it is just the list. She does the flowers most weeks. She drives two people who no longer drive. She has the spare key to a house on Fenwick Street and she has been the one to go over when the alarm goes off at two in the morning, four times. She hosts the December thing because her kitchen is the biggest. She proofreads the newsletter and nobody has ever mentioned it out loud because nobody knows she does it.

The last time Lena said the word no out loud to a person was six years ago, in a parking lot, and she had rehearsed it in the car for eleven minutes first, and afterward her hands shook and she sat in the driver's seat and cried, not because of what the woman said, which was fine, but because of what it had cost her to produce one syllable.

She is not tired. That is what people assume and it is not it. She has energy for all of it and most of it she genuinely enjoys. What has happened is quieter than exhaustion. Somewhere in the middle of twenty years she stopped hearing the tone as a request phrased badly and started hearing it as accurate. As information. As a group of ordinary decent people who have correctly identified what she is: a resource that gets allocated, and the ones who get allocated are the ones who do not get asked.

Maybe your hallway is an office or a family text thread. It does not matter which. You know the tone. You know the sentence with the period at the end where the question mark belongs, and you know what you say back, and you know exactly how long it has been since you said anything else. I am not going to tell you to say no on Sunday. But look at what the tone has never once had the authority to decide. You are His, and that was settled long before anybody wrote your name on a list. Scripture puts it plainly in 1 Corinthians 6:19 that you are not your own, and the Holy Spirit has been saying that over you in the hallway every week while your elbow was being held.

Ye are not your own, and read who the sentence hands you to

There is a line in Paul's letter that gets used as a warning and was written as a deed.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Ye are not your own. Read that once as a rebuke, which is how it usually gets read, and then read it again as the thing it actually is, which is a statement of ownership with a name attached.

Because the sentence does not stop at not your own. It says whose. Which are God's. It is not telling you that you have no standing. It is telling you that your standing is held somewhere very specific, and that the somewhere is not a hallway, and not a schedule, and not the reasonable expectations of forty people who are fond of you.

You are not your own, and the One you belong to is not anybody standing near that coffee table. 1 Corinthians 6:20 says it in five words and does not soften them, and the Spirit has been settling that in you long before you had language for what was bothering you.

And notice the last word of the passage. God's. Possessive, singular, closed. There is no clause allowing for shared custody, no provision for a group of well meaning people to hold a portion. If you are His, then every claim anybody else makes on you is a claim on property that is not theirs, however kindly it is phrased and however much you want to say yes to it.

The yes is not the problem. The ownership is.

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly where a message like this usually goes wrong and does damage.

I am not telling you to step down from the flowers. I am not telling you to hand back the key to the house on Fenwick Street, or to stop driving anybody, or to tell one single person on Sunday that things are going to be different now. Nothing in this message requires you to have a conversation with anybody, and nothing in it requires you to leave a room, a group, or a family.

You may do all the same things next week. Genuinely. That is allowed and it may well be right.

What changes is where the yes comes from. A yes given by a person who has been correctly identified as a resource is not a gift, it is a withdrawal, and everybody in the transaction can feel it even when nobody says so. A yes given by a person who belongs to God is a gift, freely handed over, out of a life that is not in circulation. Same flowers. Completely different act.

It is already settled whose you are, and no tone of voice has ever had the standing to reassign it. His word closed the question in 1 Corinthians 6:20 when it said which are God's, and His Spirit is what makes that read as a fact about you rather than a fine principle about believers.

And the claim was made first. Nothing about you qualified you for it. Not twenty years of the flowers, not four alarms at two in the morning, not the newsletter nobody knows you proofread. If any of that had been the qualification, then it could be spent down, and the day you had nothing left to give would be the day you stopped being His. That is not the arrangement and it never was.