They Asked Me to Unpack It

It was a good group and the man who asked was being generous, and that is why it has taken her four months to stop thinking about it.

Sophie had said something. Eleven words, maybe twelve, about why she keeps going when things are hard. It came out plainly because that is how it exists in her, and she meant it entirely, and the room was quiet for a second in a way that felt fine.

And then a man she likes said, warmly, that is lovely, Sophie. Do you want to unpack that a bit?

And she said, yes, sure, and she opened her mouth.

And there was nothing in there.

Not because she had lost it. Because the eleven words were the whole of it. There is no second layer. What she said is not a summary of a longer thing, it is the thing, at actual size, and being asked to unpack it was like being asked to unpack a stone.

She said something else, which was a paraphrase with more syllables in it, and it was fine, and the group moved on and somebody made a joke and it was a good evening.

She is thirty-one.

And what she has been carrying since is not embarrassment about the pause. It is a suspicion that arrived in the car and has not left, which is that if a thing cannot be unpacked, maybe it is not much of a thing.

Everybody else in that room can unpack. She has heard them. Somebody says a sentence and then there are four more underneath it, and they are good sentences and she is not being sarcastic and she has learned from every one of them.

She simply does not have four more. She has eleven words, and she has had them since she was nineteen, and until that Thursday she had never once thought of them as a shortfall.

And you may know that pause. Somebody may have asked you kindly to go deeper into something that had no deeper, and you may have been carrying it as a verdict ever since.

God is on record about who He deliberately chooses

Take this off before we go any further, because you have carried it since that Thursday and it was never yours.

You are not short of anything. You never were. Scripture is on record about who God deliberately picks and why, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the number of layers under your sentence, who makes anything real in a person. Set it down here on the table. It is heavy and it has been in the car with you for four months.

Now hear it, and hear that it is a choice rather than an accident.

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.1 Corinthians 1:27

God chose.

Twice, in one sentence. This is not God making do with what turned up. It is a deliberate preference, stated by a man who was himself formidably trained and who is writing to a church that was extremely impressed by cleverness.

And notice what the choosing is for. To shame the wise, which is not cruelty, it is a correction: the arrangement is set up so that nobody can mistake the power for the packaging.

Which means a thing that cannot be unpacked is not automatically a small thing. Some things are small. And some things are simply the actual size, and God has a documented preference for putting real weight inside plain containers so that nobody credits the container.

That is written, and His Spirit is the one who put your eleven words in you at nineteen, and He has never once measured anybody by layers.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says the people who unpack are showing off. They are not. Those four sentences underneath are often real work and you have learned from them and said so, and a church with nobody in it who can go deeper is a church that gets pushed over by the first strong wind.

Depth is a gift. Some of them have it and it costs them time you do not spend, and Scripture is full of it and His Spirit gives it on purpose.

And nothing here says you should not learn. Learn. Read. Ask the man who asked you the question, because he would be delighted.

The point is only that plain is not the same as shallow, and Scripture states a preference that makes that plain, and His Spirit is the one who decides what carries weight.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The suspicion in the car is a reasonable inference and it is wrong.

You reasoned that unpackable equals substantial, because everybody in that room can do it and they are good people and it is what you saw. But it is an inference from a room, not from Scripture, and Scripture goes the other way on purpose. His Spirit was in that pause with you and He did not hear a shortfall.