There Are Two Hundred of Us

There are two hundred and eleven of you.

You know the number because it is on the front of the document. Two hundred and eleven, and one of them is a building you open at six in the morning and lock at eight at night.

You are on page four. You are a row.

The row has your location on it and a set of columns, and if you read across it you can see what kind of quarter you have had according to people who have never been in the room.

For the first two years that did not bother you at all. It was arithmetic and you are not a sentimental woman.

Something has changed in the last while and it is worth being exact about it.

You have started to hear the row as a description.

Not consciously. But when you think about how it is going, the answer that arrives is the row. When you feel about yourself, the feeling has a column in it.

Two hundred and eleven, and one of them is you, and the you in that sentence has begun to be the row rather than the woman.

Here is the tell, and you noticed it yourself in April. You started saying we are having a tough quarter to people who do not know what a quarter is.

That is a chart talking through a mouth.

There is a verse about being named that goes at this directly.

I have called thee by thy name

God speaks to a whole people in Isaiah and does something odd in the middle of it. He goes singular.

Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. (Isaiah 43:1, King James Version)

He is addressing a nation. Hundreds of thousands of people. And in the middle of a national address He says I have called thee by thy name.

Not I have counted thee. Not I know how many of you there are. By thy name.

You have been called by name inside a crowd rather than counted in one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that. Isaiah 43:1 goes singular in the middle of a national address, and He has been doing it in a building on page four for four years.

Now the tense of it, because it is the part that answers the row.

I have called. Past tense. Completed. It is not something that happens when a person is impressive or when a quarter goes well.

It happened. It is behind you rather than ahead of you, and nothing on page four can reach back and undo it.

You have already been named, and Scripture puts it in the past tense rather than as something to be earned. The Spirit of God is the one who did the calling, and it is written in Isaiah 43 that it was finished before anybody ever built a chart.

And look at the last three words, because they are the whole thing. Thou art mine.

Not thou art counted. Not thou art on my list. Mine, which is a word about belonging and about somebody taking responsibility.

You are somebody's rather than something's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a felt thing in a woman on page four. The written word ends the sentence with mine rather than with a number, and Isaiah 43:1 is where it stands.

The chart is not lying, it is just small

Let me be fair to the document, because a grievance would not help you.

The row is accurate. Everything in those columns is true. Nobody has misrepresented anything and the people who compile it are doing an honest job with the information they can gather.

The problem is not accuracy. The problem is size.

A row can hold about six facts. A person is not six facts. So a row is not wrong about you; it is simply far too small to be a description, and it was never built to be one.

You have been reading a small true thing as though it were the whole account, and it is written that God calls a person by name rather than by column. The Spirit of God is the one who holds the whole account, and Isaiah 43 says how He addresses it.

And here is the part that will actually change something this week.

The row has been doing something to you sideways. A woman who is being read as a row starts reading other people as rows, and it happens without any decision.

Think about the man who brings the deliveries. Do you know his name? Or is he the delivery.

You have been handed the same thing you have been receiving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who catches that in a person before it becomes a habit. Scripture puts the naming at the center of how God deals with anybody, and He is catching it now.

Learn one name and use it

So here is the thing to do, and it is small, and it turns outward on purpose.

Pick one person who has been getting treated as a role. The delivery man. The woman who does the cleaning. Somebody on the phone whose voice is familiar and whose name is not.

Learn their name. Then use it out loud, to their face, this week.

You are naming somebody rather than being named, and Isaiah 43:1 puts the calling by name at the center of how God handles a crowd. The Spirit of God is the one who works through that, and He does not need it to be a large gesture.

The reason it turns outward is that the inward version does not work. Telling yourself you are more than a row is an argument with a document, and arguments with documents are unwinnable.

Naming somebody else is not an argument. It is an act, and acts change the person doing them.

You have something to do rather than something to believe harder, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the rest of it. The written word makes the naming a thing that gets done rather than felt, and Isaiah 43:1 is the pattern for it.

Then go and open at six in the morning, and page four says exactly what it said.