The Woman Three Rows In Front

You have never told anybody this and there is no reason you would have.

There is a woman, and she sits three rows in front, or she is at the same school gate, or she is the one at work whose desk you pass. It does not matter where. What matters is that it is one specific person, and there is a checking that happens, and it has been going on for years.

She has no idea. She has never done a thing. If she knew she would be baffled, and if she is the sort of woman I expect she is, she would probably be kind about it, which would be worse.

Now, everybody knows this happens in general. What almost nobody says is that it is often one person in particular, and that the one person is not chosen for any reason anybody could explain.

I have been listening to women in kitchens for a long time and I have never once heard a satisfactory account of why it was that woman. It just was.

And I want to look at the question underneath it, because I think it has been misheard for a long time.

What the question actually is

Here is the shape of it as it presents itself.

The question seems to be: how do I compare.

But watch what actually happens when the answer comes back, whichever way it comes back. If it comes back badly you feel it for an afternoon. If it comes back well, which it does sometimes, the relief lasts about two minutes and then something else in you feels slightly unpleasant about having been pleased.

Neither result settles anything. And a question whose answers are both unsatisfactory is not the question that is being asked.

You are being asked something that has no good answer in either direction, and it has never once been the question that was actually put to you. John 21 says what is that to thee? follow thou me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a woman back her own instruction.

What is actually being asked is: am I all right.

And that question has been sent, over and over, to a woman three rows in front who does not know it was sent to her and could not answer it if she did.

You are sending a real question to somebody who has never once been able to receive it, and no woman in that room has ever had the answer. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what she is actually asking, and John 21 has somebody ask about another person and get one of the most direct answers in the Gospels.

And the second half, which is the cost.

That woman has been a fixture in your week for years without ever being a person. You could describe her face. You could not tell me one thing about her life.

She might be somebody you would like enormously. She has probably needed something during those years that you would have given her without a second thought if you had known. But the role she is in does not have any room for that in it.

You are missing a person entirely because a role is standing where she is, and she has never once been anything but a person the whole time. Scripture in John 21 has the answer redirect a man away from somebody else's business entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands a woman a neighbor back.

What is that to thee

At the very end of John's Gospel, Peter has just been given his own instructions, and he immediately asks about somebody else.

Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus saith unto him... what is that to thee? follow thou me. (John 21:21 and 22, King James Version)

It is one of the plainest things He ever says to anybody.

What is that to thee. Which is not a rebuke exactly, though it is not soft either. It is a question that closes a subject. Peter has raised a topic that is genuinely none of his business, and he is told so, and then he is given something else to do instead.

Follow thou me. The thou is emphatic in that sentence. You. Never mind him. You follow me.

You are being handed your own instructions rather than an answer about somebody else, and there has never once been a version of this where the other person's business was yours. It is written in John 21 that Jesus said what is that to thee, follow thou me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who closes a subject in a woman that nobody else has ever closed.

And notice what makes it possible for that to land as relief rather than as a scolding.

Peter is not being told he does not matter. He has just been given a whole commission, three times over, in the conversation immediately before this. He is full of his own instructions when he turns round and asks about John.

So the answer is not: mind your own business, you are nobody. It is: you have your own, and it is substantial, and this other question is a distraction from it.

You are somebody with your own instructions rather than somebody waiting on a comparison, and that other woman's life has never once been part of your assignment. The Spirit of God is what gives a woman her own thing to do at the moment she is looking at somebody else's, and the written word says follow thou me.

Sit somewhere different

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately physical rather than mental.

Sit somewhere different this week.

That is all. Different pew, different part of the room, different door, different route past the desk. Do not announce it, do not explain it, and do not make a decision about never sitting there again.

Once. Somewhere else.

Here is why physical rather than mental. Checking cannot be stopped by deciding to stop, because it is faster than a decision, and deciding has been tried. But the checking depends on a sightline, and a sightline is a physical fact, and physical facts can be changed by moving four feet to the left.

And what you will notice is how much of the hour comes back. That is the real finding, and it has never been available before, because the sightline has always been there.

Then afterward, do one warm slow thing for your own body. Not connected to any of this. Just a woman who has had her whole attention back for an hour, being warm.

You are able to change a sightline and get an hour back, and no amount of deciding has ever once been able to do what moving four feet does. The written word in John 21 hands a man his own work instead of an answer about somebody else, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten warm minutes afterward into care rather than into a reward.