When the Work Was the Name

For twenty two years Rob was introduced by what he did and now he is introduced by a pause.

That is not self pity, it is a description. There was a noun. It went at the front of his name and it had gone at the front of his name since he was twenty nine, and when people met him it did the work of telling them who he was, and he never once thought about it, in the way that a man does not think about the floor.

The noun is gone. And there is nothing wrong with the way people handle it. They say his name, and then there is a small space where the noun used to go, and then they say something else, usually something kind and slightly general.

Here is what nobody outside understands about a job that is also a name.

He did not lose an income and a routine. He lost the answer to the question people ask each other in the first thirty seconds of every conversation on earth.

He has practiced answers. He has about four now. Two are true and dull, one is a joke, and one is a slightly larger claim about a thing he does occasionally that he would not describe that way if he were being strict.

And what has happened over two years of using them is that he has begun to feel like a man carrying a forged document. Not because he is lying. Because he has learned that any answer he gives is a construction, which has forced him to notice that the old one was a construction too. He simply never had to build it, so it never felt like one.

And this is where I stop writing about Rob, because you had a noun too.

I am not going to ask what it was. That is yours and it stays yours.

A foundation with a seal on it

I want to give you a sentence that is about exactly this, and the picture in it is a building, which is right, because what has gone out from under you is structural.

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19

That word nevertheless is doing something. Read the verses before it and you find Paul describing people whose faith has been overturned and a situation coming apart, and then he sets this down against all of it: nevertheless.

A foundation is not the part you show people. Nobody has ever been introduced by their foundation. It is under everything, it is not visible in any photograph of the building, and its whole job is to be the thing that does not move when the visible parts do.

And then the seal, which is the inscription cut into it: The Lord knoweth them that are his.

Not the Lord uses them. Not the Lord employs them. Knoweth. It is the language of relationship rather than function, and it is deliberately not a job description.

So take that where the pause happens. You are known and not merely used, and 2 Timothy 2:19 says the seal on the foundation is that the Lord knoweth them that are his, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man who has run out of nouns.

And notice what the verse quietly refuses to do. It does not give you a replacement noun. There is no new title in it. It offers something underneath titles, which is exactly what a man needs when he has learned that all of them are constructions, and the written word is honest enough not to hand you another one to lean on, and the Spirit of God is not in the business of issuing job descriptions to hold people up.