The Ones Who Go Where It Is Bigger

Six of them. He taught every one.

He had them from about eleven years old. He took them out, he answered the questions nobody else would answer, he was there for the bad year each of them had, and he taught them everything he knows and a few things he only half knows.

They are good. Two of them are better than he ever was, and he says that without any difficulty at all.

All six have gone to bigger places.

He has written to every one of them. He meant every word. He has been to two of the places and sat at the back and been genuinely, uncomplicatedly delighted, and told them so afterwards, and they knew he meant it.

Here is what he cannot name.

There is something sitting underneath the gladness.

It is not jealousy. He has checked that carefully, more than once, because he is the sort of man who checks. He does not want them back. He does not want them smaller. If somebody offered him the chance to have them all here again on the condition that they were less than they are, he would refuse it without thinking.

The closest he can get to it is this. It is like standing on a beach after a boat has gone out.

The boat going out is right. It is what the boat is for. You built it for exactly that.

And you are still standing on the beach.

If you have watched the young ones go, come and sit down on the mat. There is plenty and nobody here is asking you to explain anything.

What Moses said when somebody offered him a jealousy

There is a moment where a younger man tries to defend Moses against people doing what Moses does, and the answer he gets is one of the most generous sentences in the Old Testament.

And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his young men, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid them. And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!Numbers 11:28-29

Enviest thou for my sake.

He sees the offer for what it is. Joshua is not being malicious. He is being loyal, and he is offering his teacher a perfectly respectable jealousy, and Moses declines it in a single question.

And then he goes further than declining. He asks for more of them. Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets.

And notice where he is standing when he says it. He is not somewhere bigger. He is in a camp with a great many complaints in it, about to have a very difficult few decades, and he wants the Spirit on everybody anyway.

You are standing where Moses stood, glad about the ones who went and still in the camp. Numbers 11:29 has him refusing a jealousy and asking for the Spirit on all of them, and it is the Holy Spirit named inside the verse as the thing he wanted spread wider, which means the gladness you have been checking is the same gladness the record kept.

Naming the thing underneath

Now the thing that has never had a name, because it can be named and it is not the thing it has been feared to be. It is not envy. You have tested that and the test came back clean, and the test was a good one: you would not take them back smaller. What it is, is the cost of sending. Sending is a real loss. It has to be, or it is not sending. A man who gives six people everything he has for twenty years and then watches all six go somewhere else has lost six people, and the fact that the loss is right does not make it not a loss.

You are carrying the price of a good thing rather than the residue of a bad one. John 3:29 has John the Baptist saying he that hath the bride is the bridegroom, but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice, and it is written by somebody describing his own joy at being decreased, and it is the same Spirit who works that gladness in a person, which means what sits under yours is the weight that comes with having actually given something away.

What the beach actually is

Here is the image you found, and it is better than you know.

Standing on a beach after a boat has gone out.

You have been treating the beach as what is left over, the place a man is because the interesting thing has departed. A beach is where boats are built and launched and come back to. It is not the residue of a boat. It is the thing that makes boats possible, and there is not one boat on that water that did not start on it.

You are standing in the place the sending happens rather than in what is left after it. 2 Timothy 2:2 says the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also, and it describes a chain that requires somebody to stay at each link, and it is the same Spirit who equips at every point of it, which means the beach is a station and not a remainder.