You Did Well to Share It

The pot has been on the table for forty minutes and it is going cold under the cloth, and neither of them has mentioned it.

His friend rang at four and said, "I am coming round," and then did not ask, which is the only reason it worked. If there had been a question in it he would have said the thing he always says, that they are fine, that it is under control, that it is honestly not as bad as it sounds. There was no question in it. There was a doorbell at twenty to five.

So now there are two chairs pulled close, closer than the room usually has them, because his friend moved his own chair when he sat down and did it without making anything of it. There is a plate of biscuits that nobody is going to touch. There is a lamp on in the corner even though it is not dark yet. And there is the thing that is currently happening, which is the reason for the visit and has not been said out loud once.

They have done the football. They have done the neighbor's fence, which is genuinely an epic and got them nine minutes. They have done his friend's daughter and the price of the trains. Twice now he has come right up to the edge of the actual matter, felt his mouth start to shape it, and turned the sentence into something else on the way out.

Because he has the finished version already prepared. He always does. Somewhere in him is a telling of all this from six months in the future, with the shape on it and the worst bit made funny and an ending attached, and that version is the one people get. Not because he is a liar, and not because he is proud exactly. It is that a finished thing can be handed to somebody safely. You know what they will do with it, because it is over, and nothing they say can get inside it and change how it goes.

This thing is not over. It is happening in his house tonight and it will still be happening tomorrow, and to say it out loud now, in this room, would be handing his friend something that is still moving.

And under that, the real one, the sentence he would deny if you said it to him. If this man sees me in the middle of it, the picture he has of me changes, and I do not get to change it back.

His friend picks up the pot, feels the side of it, and puts it down again. Neither of them says anything about tea.

Then his friend says, not looking at him, looking at the fireplace, "I have got nowhere to be."

And the man in the chair is sitting eighteen inches from somebody who has cleared his evening, with a fully rehearsed six months from now in his mouth and nothing in the present tense at all.

You know that room. It may not be tea and it may not be a friend of thirty years, but you know what it is to be able to tell people things afterwards and never during, and to have got so good at the finished version that nobody in your life has ever been in the middle of anything with you. I am not going to tell you your independence is a defect. I want to show you what Paul called it when somebody got into the middle of his.

Paul says the two things in consecutive sentences

There is a run of verses at the end of Philippians that gets quoted in halves, and the halves have been separated for so long that most people do not know they are neighbors.

The first half is the famous one. Paul says he has learned, in whatever state he is, to be content. He can do all things through Him who strengthens him. That is the sentence on the mug and the fridge magnet, and it is a real sentence, written by a man in custody.

Now read the very next thing he writes.

Yet it was kind of you to share my trouble.Philippians 4:14

Those two sit side by side. The most self sufficient sounding paragraph in the letters, and then, immediately, a thank you for being helped, with no embarrassment in it anywhere and no apology attached.

And look at the verb. The Greek is a compound built on koinonia, the fellowship word. It is not the word for rescuing and it is not the word for charity. It means to go into partnership with a thing, to have it in common. They did not solve his trouble. They came into it with him and had it in common with him, and Paul, who could have written a paragraph explaining that he did not really need it, calls that kindly done.

You are a person in a partnership, and Philippians 4:14 calls that kindly done rather than needy. I am not flattering you into anything. It is what is written, in that order, one verse after the contentment, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line from a man in custody and lays it in a front room with the pot going cold.

Notice that Paul commends them. That is the part that undoes the arithmetic you have been running. In your version, the person who tells is spending something and the person who listens is giving something, so telling puts you in debt and you have kept out of debt your whole life. Paul's version has no debt in it: the word he uses makes them partners in one thing rather than a creditor and a debtor.

You have a friend in the second chair, and Scripture calls what he is doing well done. That is not my opinion about your evening; it is the plain sense of the verse, and it is His Spirit who makes a first century sentence a present fact in a room eighteen inches wide.

The picture does not change the way you think it does

Let me take up the real sentence now, the one under everything: if this man sees me in the middle of it, the picture he has of me changes and I do not get it back.

I am not going to argue about whether that has happened to you. It may have. People are not all the same and some of them are careless with what they are handed, and if you learned to hand over only the finished version, you learned it for a reason and I am not going to poke at it.

What I will say is what the text says about standing. Paul was not diminished in that letter. He is not a smaller apostle in verse fourteen than he was in verse thirteen. The people who shared his trouble did not acquire a lower picture of him; they acquired a share in something, which is a different transaction entirely.

You were never going to lose your standing by being seen in the middle of something. That is what is written into the shape of those two verses sitting next to each other, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than merely agreeable on a page.

And one more thing, plainly, because it needs saying and it does not always get said. If you are reading this in a room with no second chair in it, I am not going to pretend somebody is on their way. Some people read a message like this alone, and the friend of thirty years is not a thing anybody is guaranteed. What I will say is that the One Paul was writing to is not late and not busy, and that the sharing Philippians describes is first of all what He does. You are being shared with tonight, whichever room you are in. It is written that He is a very present help in trouble, and it is His Spirit who is the present part of that, in the present tense, in the middle of the thing rather than after it.