Sorry to Bother You, But

You know the sentence before it arrives, because it always starts the same way.

The phone goes. You look at the name and you already know, because that particular name only ever appears in a particular kind of weather. You answer, and there is no hello. There is never a hello. There is a small intake of breath and then: "Sorry to bother you, but..."

And off it goes. The heating has done the thing again. There is water coming through the ceiling of the small room where the toddlers go. The projector will not talk to the laptop, and it did last week, and nobody has touched anything. The door at the side has stuck and it is the one the wheelchair uses. Somebody has locked something and nobody knows who has the key, and there is a wedding on Saturday.

You are already reaching for your coat with the phone under your ear, and by the time you have got to the car you have run through four possible causes and narrowed it to two, and you know which bag in the boot you need.

Everybody has a bag in the boot. Yours has a socket set in it, or a multimeter, or forty feet of cable, or a folder of every certificate that building has ever been issued going back years, which you keep because you once discovered that nobody else on earth had a copy. There is a knack to the door. You have the knack. There are seven people who could do the heating and six of them would break it, and you and the caller both know which six.

And here is what must be said plainly before anything else, because it is true and because the temptation to be clever about it would be cheap. The people who ring you are lovely. They genuinely are sorry to bother you. They say so first, every time, and they mean it. They thank you afterwards, properly, and some of them have thanked you in front of everybody more than once. They would help you tomorrow if they had the first idea how, and the reason they ring you is not that they take you for granted. It is that you are the one who can, and they are frightened of the water coming through the ceiling.

Nobody in this story is at fault. That is what makes it hurt in the particular way it does.

Because somewhere over the years the arithmetic settled. Every call has a fault attached to it. Not one of them has ever been for nothing. And a person can be thanked warmly a hundred times, and still, at eleven at night, sit in the car outside their own house with the engine off doing a sum they would be embarrassed to say out loud: that if nothing in that building ever broke again, they are not entirely sure what they would be to those people.

That is the sentence. You have never said it to anybody, and you would sooner not have seen it written down.

Stay with it for a minute, because there is a conversation in John's gospel that goes exactly there.

A servant is a job with a person attached

It is the last night before everything falls apart, and Jesus is talking to men who have been working for Him for three years.

Working, genuinely. There were logistics. Somebody handled the money. Somebody found the boat. Somebody was sent ahead to sort out the room with the table in it, and somebody had to go and find a donkey and explain to its owner why it was leaving. These are men who got things done, and they would every one of them have described themselves as servants, and they would have said it proudly.

And He takes the word off them.

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.John 15:15

Notice how He defines the difference, because it is not about status and it is not about how hard anybody works. It is about what you get told. A servant knows the job. A friend knows the man. The servant is on a need-to-know arrangement: here is the fault, here is the tool, thank you, we will call again when the next thing goes. The friend gets let in on what is actually going on.

He does not say: from now on I will ask less of you. He asks more of them, in that same conversation, and most of them will give their lives. What He changes is what they are to Him while they do it.

You are a friend of God, and that title was never issued in exchange for a repair. Scripture has Jesus taking the word servant off men who had been working for Him for three years and handing them friendship instead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that name land on somebody rather than sitting on a page. The bag in your boot is not what you are. It never was.

And there is something else in that verse worth standing on, because it speaks to the specific loneliness of being the one who fixes things. A servant is defined by the fault. No fault, no reason to call. Which means a man who has come to think of himself as a servant will always, quietly, need something to be broken.

You have been given the whole of what He has heard from the Father, and none of it is on a need-to-know basis. The written word says all things He heard from His Father He made known, and the Holy Spirit is described as the one who takes what is His and shows it to us, so nothing about your standing with Him is being kept behind the counter until you are useful again.

He called them before there was anything to do

Go back three years in the same story, to the day it started.

Mark says He went up into a mountain and called to Him whom He would, and ordained twelve, and then gives the reason in two parts, in an order that has been quietly ignored for two thousand years. That they should be with Him. And that He might send them forth.

With Him first. Sent second. That is not a nice thought, it is the actual sequence in the text, and everything the twelve ever did came out of the first part.

Nobody was recruited for a skill. There is no line in the gospels where He asks what anybody is good at. He called fishermen and a tax collector and a political radical, which as a team is close to unworkable, and the reason it worked is that none of them was there because of what he brought.

You were called for company before you were ever called for competence. Scripture puts being with Him ahead of being sent out, in that order, in the sentence that founded the whole thing, and the Holy Spirit is given as the one who makes the being-with real on a Tuesday rather than theoretical. The tools came later. They always come later.

Now, this is where a certain kind of writing would tell you to put the bag down and stop answering the phone, and that would be somebody else's article and it is not this one. Nothing here is asking you to serve less. If the heating goes on Sunday morning and you are the one who can, go, and take the socket set, and be glad you have the knack, because that knack is a real gift and it has kept a real building warm for real people for years.

The change is not in your hands. It is in what you think the call is for.

You are not on trial in that building, and nobody there is holding your file. His word calls those in Christ sons and heirs rather than hired hands, and the Holy Spirit is named as the one who tells us so from the inside, which is exactly where the eleven o'clock arithmetic happens. The sum in the car was never Heaven's sum. It came from somewhere, but it did not come from Him.