What Is The Point Of Me If I Cannot Help

You are asking an honest question and nobody is answering it honestly.

Everybody tells you that just being there is enough. And you have heard that sentence enough times now that it has stopped meaning anything, because nobody ever explains what being there actually does.

So it sounds like a kind thing said to somebody who has nothing to offer, which is exactly what you suspect you are.

I am going to try to answer the question properly. Not with reassurance. With an actual account of what a person with no answers contributes to a table, because there is one, and nobody has ever set it out for you.

And the question has been getting louder rather than quieter. It started as a passing thought a few months ago, and it has become the thing that decides whether you go into that room at all. Which means it is no longer a question. It is a policy, and nobody in the house voted on it.

Members one of another

There is a sentence in Romans about how a body works that has something quite specific in it.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. (Romans 12:5, King James Version)

Members one of another. Not members of a body, which would be the obvious phrasing. Members of each other.

Which means the connection is not routed through a central thing. It is direct, part to part. What one part is doing affects the next part without anything in between.

You are connected to somebody at that table without anything in between, and no connection like that has ever once required a transaction to justify it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a kitchen rather than an idea about a church, and Romans 12:5 puts the membership part to part.

And notice what a body is actually like. Most of the parts of a body are not doing anything identifiable at any given moment. They are present, and connected, and the whole thing works differently because they are there.

A hand does not stop being useful during the hours it is not holding anything.

You were never on duty in the way you have been assuming, and no part of a body has ever once had to be visibly working in order to be part of it. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a person off a productivity measure, and the written word describes membership rather than function.

What presence actually does

So let me give you the real account, because the reassurance has failed you and you deserve mechanics.

Three things happen at a table because an adult is sitting at it, and none of them require knowing anything.

The first is that the work becomes a shared activity rather than a solitary one. A child working alone is doing homework. A child working next to somebody is doing homework with somebody. Those are different experiences and children report them differently years later.

The second is that quitting becomes harder. Not because anybody would stop her. Because somebody is there, and a thing attempted in company gets abandoned later than a thing attempted alone. That is simply how people work, at every age.

You have been holding a door open every evening that would otherwise have closed earlier, and nobody has ever once been able to do that from another room. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a thing nobody in that kitchen can see, and Romans 12:5 makes every one members one of another with nothing in between.

The third is that the difficulty gets witnessed. When she finds it hard, somebody sees her find it hard, and she does not have to describe it afterward to a person who was not there. That is a larger thing than it sounds, and it is the one adults most often forget because they have usually got somebody who does it for them.

You have been supplying three things every evening that you have never once counted. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see what their own body in a chair has been doing, and Romans 12:5 makes the membership itself the connection.

And here is the thing underneath the question you asked.

Somewhere you learned that being useful means producing something. That is a real belief and most of us have some version of it, and it is usually taught by work, or by a childhood in which usefulness was how a person earned their place.

It is not the way a body works and it is not the way this passage describes anything.

You were never earning your place at that table, and no member of a body has ever once had to justify being attached to it. The Spirit of God is the one who dismantles a measure a person has been running on themselves for decades, and the written word puts the membership before any account of function.

Ten minutes, contributing nothing

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately the thing that frightens most people about this.

Tonight, sit at the table for ten minutes and contribute nothing but your presence.

Do not look anything up. Do not ask whether she is all right. Do not offer to fetch anything. Do not apologize for not being able to help.

You are permitted to give ten minutes with nothing attached to them, and an offer with no apology on it has never once been the smaller one. The Spirit of God is the one who is present while a person sits down and says nothing about it, and Romans 12:5 puts the membership ahead of any account of function.

That last one is the whole exercise, because the apology is the thing that actually damages the ten minutes. It takes a completed act of company and reopens it as a deficiency.

Bring something of your own. A form, a book, a thing that has been sitting on the side for three weeks. Do that beside her, badly, at the same table.

You have been given something to do with your hands that is not helping, and a person doing their own work beside a child has never once been the same as a person watching one. The Spirit of God is the one who is present at a table where two unrelated jobs happen side by side, and Romans 12:5 makes the membership part to part.

And when the ten minutes ends, get up without a summary.

Romans 12:5 makes every one members one of another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at a table where two people work on unrelated things beside each other.

You are permitted to sit down with nothing to offer, and nothing to offer has never once been the same as nothing to give. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in ten minutes that produce no visible result, and the written word makes the connection part to part with nothing in between.

You have three things to supply tonight that have never once required an answer to any question. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a chair into a contribution, and Romans 12:5 puts the membership ahead of the function.