I Am Always The One Who Moves

She worked it out doing something completely trivial, which is where these things happen, and it has been sitting in her since.

She was making a cup of tea for somebody, and she made it the way they like it, which is not the way anybody in her family makes tea, and she has known how they like it for about six years.

And she thought: does anybody here know how I take mine?

And she went round the whole thing in her head while the kettle went, and the answer is no, not really, and it is not because they do not care about her. It is because she has never once said. She just makes it herself, the way she likes it, quietly, without ever mentioning that there is a way.

And then it opened out, the way these things do at a kettle.

The music in the car when there is somebody else in it. What gets cooked when people come. Which stories she tells and which ones need too much explaining. How she says goodbye to people. Whether she hugs. What she calls things.

Every single one of them, she is the one who moved.

Not once. Not one time in six years has a room in her life shifted an inch toward her, and the reason is not that any of those rooms is unkind. It is that she is very fast, and she is very good at it, and she has always moved first, so nothing has ever had to.

She said it to the kettle: I have never let anybody meet me.

You know that kettle.

Maybe you are the fast one too. Maybe you have a whole set of small accommodations that nobody around you knows they are receiving. Maybe somebody would be genuinely upset to find out how much you adjust, and would say so, and you have never given them the chance.

Nobody has taken advantage of you. That is what makes this hard to say out loud without sounding aggrieved. Everybody in your life would move if they knew there was somewhere to move to, and none of them know, because you have never left anything standing still long enough for them to see it.

What a body does with unlike parts

Here is a sentence about a body, and the word in the middle of it is one people skip.

For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.Romans 12:4-5

All members have not the same office.

Office is a working word. It means a function, a part in the operation, a thing that is yours to do that is not somebody else's to do.

So a body is not a set of interchangeable pieces that have agreed to get along. It is a set of parts with different offices, and the differences are structural rather than decorative, and a body that flattened them would stop working rather than becoming more harmonious.

And then the last clause: every one members one of another. Which is mutual. Not: some members carry others. Every one, of another, both directions.

You are a member of one body with an office of your own, and adapting was never meant to run one way. That is what the mutuality in Romans 12:5 establishes (Romans 12:4-5), and it is the Holy Spirit who divides to every man severally as He wills, which means the things you keep moving out of the way were assigned rather than incidental.

The adapting was real love

Let me say this before anything else, because you will otherwise turn this into a grievance and it is not one.

What you have been doing for six years is love. It is not weakness and it is not people pleasing in the diminishing sense. Being able to read what somebody needs and give it to them without being asked is a genuine gift and there are not many people who have it.

And you have made a great many rooms comfortable and a lot of people have been glad you were there without ever knowing why.

You have not been overlooked or used, and the adapting came out of a real gift rather than out of fear. Scripture says look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others (Philippians 2:4), and read the word also, which makes it both and not instead, and it is the Holy Spirit who produces that outward attention in a person, which He has been producing in you for years.

The word also is where the trouble is. You have been doing the second half of that verse and skipping the first.

And nothing here says make demands

Let me be plain, because this could turn into somebody arriving at a family gathering with a list.

Nothing here tells you to start announcing your preferences, to keep score of who has adapted to whom, or to test people by withholding something and seeing what they do. That would be a different game with the same anxious engine.

You are not being handed a campaign about anybody's manners. The word says in honor preferring one another (Romans 12:10), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that mutual rather than one directional, which is a work He does in a room and not one you can force.

What is being suggested is one thing left standing still.