There Are Two Hundred of Us

There is a chart somewhere with your site on it, and you are a row.

You know roughly where you sit on it. Middle, probably, which is the worst place to be on a chart, because the top gets attention and the bottom gets attention and the middle gets a color.

And when somebody from the wider organization talks to you, there is a particular quality to it. Nothing unkind. They are pleasant, they are busy, and they are holding two hundred of these conversations, and you can hear the two hundred in the pauses.

I want to say something at the top that this piece is going to keep to. Nobody at head office is the villain here. They are people doing a job at a scale where individual attention is not physically available, and they are not withholding it out of contempt. If you had two hundred sites you would sound the same.

So this is not a grievance and there is nobody to be angry at. It is about something else, which is that being counted for long enough teaches a person to think of themselves as a total.

I have called thee by thy name

There is a verse in Isaiah where God says something so specific that it is almost startling, and the specificity is the point.

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. (Isaiah 43:1, King James Version)

I have called thee by thy name.

He does not say I have called you. He says by thy name, and He says it to a whole nation, which is the interesting part, because a nation is exactly the kind of thing that gets counted.

The verse is addressed to a multitude and it insists on the individual inside it. It refuses the arithmetic. It says that being one of an enormous number has no effect whatsoever on being known by name.

Isaiah 43:1 speaks to a whole people and still insists on the name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody who has been a row for four years.

You are called by name in the place where it matters, and being one of two hundred has never once diluted that. Isaiah 43:1 says I have called thee by thy name, spoken over a whole nation at once, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the individual survive the multitude.

Being counted is not being totaled

Here is the quiet damage, and I want to name it exactly, because I do not think you have noticed it happening. Isaiah 43:1 speaks straight into it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a slow erosion visible to the person it happened to.

You have been counted for years. That is fine and it is how large things work. What has happened underneath is that you began to accept the chart as a description, and then you began to use the same instrument on yourself, and now when you assess your own week you do it in the terms the chart uses, because those are the terms you have been handed.

That is a very small shift and it changes everything a person believes about themselves.

Isaiah 43:1 hands out a different instrument entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the chart out of a person's hand as a self-description.

Being counted is an administrative fact. Being a total is a belief, and you adopted it without a decision, and it is not true.

You are able to be counted without becoming a figure, and the chart has never once been a description of a person. The written word calls a member of a vast people by name, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops somebody assessing themselves with an instrument built for logistics.

Use one name this week

So here is the assignment, and it turns outward on purpose, because the inward version of this article would just be self-comfort.

Learn and use the name of one person you have been treating as a role.

You have them. The driver. The engineer who comes for the machine. The person on the regional support line. The cleaner. People you deal with regularly, pleasantly, and entirely as functions, and whose names you either never learned or learned once and let go. Isaiah 43:1 puts a name where a category would have done, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that somebody's Tuesday rather than a sentiment.

Learn one. Use it out loud, to their face, this week.

Because the thing that was done to you is now being done through you, and you did not intend that either. And the fastest way out of feeling like a role is to stop handing somebody else the same experience.

Isaiah 43:1 puts a name on somebody inside a crowd, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person to do the same thing to somebody else on a Tuesday.

You are able to hand somebody their name back, and it has never once required anybody to hand you yours first. Isaiah 43:1 insists on the name inside the multitude, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person from wanting to be known to doing the knowing.