Thirty of Them and One of You

Eight minutes before the bell, she stands outside her own classroom with her hand not quite on the handle.

Inside there are thirty chairs and thirty names on thirty pegs and a display she stapled up on Sunday night that is already coming loose at one corner. Outside there is a corridor smelling of floor polish and somebody's forgotten packed lunch, and her, holding a mug she will not finish.

She is four months in. She is good at this, though she would not say so, and she loves them, which surprised her.

But something happens at the bell that she has not told anybody, because said out loud it sounds ungrateful.

The door opens, and she stops being a person and starts being a function.

Miss. Thirty times a minute. Miss, he's got my ruler. Miss, do we need our reading books. Miss. By half past three she has answered to that word four hundred times and to her own name not once, and she drives home in a car that is very quiet and cannot always remember what she was like before September.

That is your corridor. That is your eight minutes. And I want to get to you before the handle turns, because a name is being mislaid out here and it does not have to be.

The naming happened first

Here is a thing worth knowing about how God introduces Himself when people are frightened of being lost.

He does not begin with instructions. He begins with a name, and He is careful to say whose it is.

But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

Read the order, because the order is the whole comfort. Created. Formed. Redeemed. And then, before one single thing is asked of the person He is talking to, He says the name out loud and puts His hand on it.

You were called by your name before you were ever called Miss. Not as a nice thought for a hard term. As a settled fact, spoken first, in the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it live in a corridor at twenty past eight rather than leaving it in a book. Four hundred Misses cannot reach a naming that happened before any of them.

Now let me name the ache honestly, because you have been calling it ingratitude and it is not.

You are not tired of the children. You are tired of being addressed exclusively as a job for six and a half hours, and there is no version of that which is a character flaw. Anybody would feel it. A person needs to be somebody and not only something, and a classroom is not built to supply that, because a classroom is built for the thirty and not for the one.

You have a name that the room is not equipped to use. Thou art mine, says the written word, two words and a possessive, and the Holy Spirit carries that in a woman while thirty children quite properly call her something else. Both can be true at once. One of them is a job title. The other one is you.

And I want you to see what you are doing in there, because it is easy to miss from the inside.

You are one of the few adults in those children's week who is reliably kind on purpose. Some of them will remember the room and forget the maths. Some of them will remember that a grown-up noticed when they were quiet. That is not a small thing dressed up nicely. That is a real thing, delivered daily, and it does not stop being real because it is unglamorous and nobody sends a letter.

You have work today that is landing somewhere it is counted. The written word says He formed you and then called you by name, and the Holy Spirit does not lose track of the woman doing the forming of somebody else's morning. He knows exactly who is in that room.