It Was Addressed to Somebody Else

She has been asking for eleven years and the asking has always had the same grammar.

Fill me. Give me more of You. Let me know You better. Every one of those is a good prayer and she means every word, and she would be surprised and a little hurt if anybody suggested there was something wrong with any of them.

There is nothing wrong with them.

What there is, is a subject and an object, and she has been in both slots for eleven years.

She is thirty three. She works in accounts for a company that makes agricultural equipment. She is at church most weeks and she helps with the youth thing twice a month, which she enjoys and is good at and does not think about very much.

Here is what she noticed in July, at a wedding, and has not been able to unnotice.

Her cousin, who is nineteen and about whom the family has been quietly worried for two years, sat down next to her at the reception and talked for about forty minutes. Not about anything. She said afterward, to her mother, that it was odd, because the girl does not talk to anybody.

Her mother said, without looking up, that she talks to you.

And she has been carrying that sentence since July, alongside eleven years of a prayer with only two people in it.

The sentence, unsaid: I have been asking for a private gift and somebody keeps sitting down next to me.

You may know that grammar. Fill me, more of You, and nobody else anywhere in the sentence.

The word is steward

There is a verse in Peter's first letter that changes the whole shape of this in one word, and the word is a job title.

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.1 Peter 4:10

Read what the recipients are called. Stewards.

A steward is not an owner. That is the entire content of the word. A steward is somebody who has been given real charge of something valuable that belongs to somebody else, with genuine authority over it, and with an assumption built into the role that the thing will be used the way its owner intended.

Peter does not call anybody a recipient and stop there. The receiving is real and it is named, and then in the same sentence the receiver is described as holding it on somebody else's behalf.

And it is worth noticing how much authority the word carries, because steward is easily heard as a demotion and it is the opposite of one. A steward in that world ran the household. They bought, they hired, they decided, and the owner did not stand over them. What the word removes is not the freedom. It is the loneliness of thinking the whole thing begins and ends with the person holding it.

You have been made a steward rather than an owner, and 1 Peter 4:10 names the recipients as stewards of the manifold grace of God, and it is His Spirit who takes a line from a letter written to scattered people and lands it on a woman at a wedding reception in July.

Manifold is a wide word

Consider the adjective, because it is doing something generous that is easy to skip.

Manifold means many colored, varied, of many kinds. Peter is describing the grace of God as arriving in a great range of shapes, and the reason he says so is to stop people comparing what they have been given.

Which means the thing she has been given is not required to look like anybody else's, and her forty minutes at a reception table with a nineteen year old who does not talk to anybody is a color in that range rather than a lesser version of something with a name.

You are holding one color of something described as many colored, because the written word calls the grace manifold in order to stop the comparison, and His Spirit is what turns an adjective into permission to stop measuring.

And notice the phrase in the middle: minister the same one to another. Not something else. The same. Whatever a person received is the thing they hand on, which means the receiving and the giving are not two separate transactions with a gap between them.

You have been handed the same thing you are meant to pass along, and 1 Peter 4 makes the receiving and the ministering the same object, and the same Spirit who distributes it is the one who fills.

The wanting was never selfish

Now the correction to the correction, because this article could easily be read as an accusation and it is not one.

Eleven years of praying fill me is not eleven years of selfishness. It is a person wanting God, which is the correct thing to want, and it is exactly what the psalms are full of. Nobody is being told off for asking for more of Him.

What is being added is the address line. She has been asking for a parcel and has never once looked at where it was being sent, and the parcel is real and it did arrive and it has her cousin's name on the outside of it.

You were never asking for the wrong thing, because 1 Peter 4:10 adds a destination without removing the gift, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that an expansion rather than a rebuke to a woman who has prayed faithfully for eleven years.