Somebody More Qualified Than You

Thursday afternoons have been empty since she gave up the shop.

Two hours, near enough, between the lunch things being done and the bus that brings the grandchildren past at four. She has done crosswords in them. She has watched a good deal of television she could not describe to you afterward.

And there is a woman two streets over, thirty one years old, with a baby that does not sleep and a husband working away, who is not doing well. Everybody knows. The health visitor knows. Her own mother is in another country.

She has thought about going. She thinks about it most Thursdays.

And every time, the same answer comes back, in the same words, and she has never once inspected it: somebody more qualified than me ought to do that.

She is seventy nine. She has raised four children and buried one. She has nursed a husband through eleven months. She has done more night hours with more crying babies than any professional in that town.

And she believes, entirely honestly, that there is a category of person who is trained for this, and that she is not it, and that turning up would be interfering.

That last word is the load bearing one. Interfering. It is what a woman of her generation was taught to fear more than almost anything, and it has kept a great many good women in armchairs on Thursday afternoons for a great many years.

What is that in thine hand

Moses is at a burning bush making a list of all the reasons he is the wrong man, and it is a good list. He is not being falsely modest. He cannot speak well, nobody will believe him, and he has a criminal record in the country he is being sent to.

And God asks him a question that is almost rude in how ordinary it is.

And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.Exodus 4:2

Take that in the armchair. You are equipped, and the equipment is already in your hands. The word asks, What is that in thine hand, and the answer was a stick, and it is the Holy Spirit who used it without upgrading it first.

A rod. A stick. The thing a shepherd carries because he is a shepherd, worn smooth, nothing special about it, of no interest to anybody.

That was the equipment. God did not send him back for training. He did not supply anything new. He asked what was already in the man's hand and then used it.

So take this in your armchair, and know it is not me flattering an old woman, it is what is written: what is in your hand is already enough for a Thursday afternoon. His word says what is that in thine hand, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been asking you that same question most Thursdays since you gave up the shop.

And look at what is in yours. Four children. Fifty years of nights. Eleven months of nursing. A pair of hands that know what to do with a baby that will not settle, which is not a qualification anybody prints on paper and is the exact thing that woman two streets over is short of.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he did not want to attend, and who built a movement out of what was in ordinary people's hands.

That is not a decoration on his story. It is the mechanism. He put untrained laborers, servants and shopkeepers to work visiting the sick, sitting with the dying, teaching children their letters, leading small rooms of six people, and he was criticized loudly and constantly for exactly that.

The objection at the time was the one in your chair: these people are not qualified. His answer was that the qualified were not going, and that a person with a life in their hands is not empty handed.

The name that got attached to them started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hands he put it into were entirely ordinary.