Things Too High For Me

Nerissa is walking home along Fairwood Street at about four in the afternoon and she is carrying something that was handed to her in 2021 and that she has never once agreed to carry.

She teaches. She is not in leadership anywhere and does not want to be. She goes on a Sunday, she helps with the Tuesday group because she is good with the ones who do not talk, and that is the whole of her involvement and she likes it that way.

What happened in 2021 is that two people whose opinion she respects had a falling out about this subject, and both of them, separately, over about a year, made sure she understood the position.

Not aggressively. Neither of them asked her to take a side and both would have been horrified at the suggestion.

But by the end of it she was carrying the whole thing. She knew both cases. She knew where the weak points in each of them were. She had absorbed, without ever deciding to, the sense that this was a live and serious matter which a serious person would have to work out, and that until she had worked it out there was something unfinished about her.

Four years.

She was walking home last Thursday past the launderette and the barber and the place that sells doors, and she was doing what she does on that walk, which is going round it again.

And she said, out loud, in the street, "I did not pick this up."

She said it surprised her. She said it came out in the tone you use when you have just found somebody else's bag in your hand.

She has not resolved it. She wants that said clearly, because she says people assume this story ends with her working it out. It does not. She simply noticed, on a Thursday afternoon between a launderette and a barber, that she had been carrying a bag she did not pack.

You may be carrying one too. Handed over by people who meant well and were not asking you to take it, and picked up without a decision ever being made. And nobody has ever told you that a person is allowed to set a thing down without having settled it.

A Man In Scripture Says It Plainly

There is a very short psalm, three verses long, in which a man says something that most religious people would be embarrassed to say out loud.

"LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me."Psalm 131:1

Things too high for me.

He is not apologizing. He is not describing a season of weakness he hopes to grow out of. He is stating, as a settled fact about himself, that there are matters he does not exercise himself in, and he says it to God as a good thing.

And the psalm is in the book. Nobody edited it out for being insufficiently rigorous.

You have been given permission by somebody in Scripture who said it first. Psalm 131 puts that sentence in a man's own mouth and never once treats it as a deficiency, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes three verses and puts them into a bright street between a launderette and a barber.

And look at what follows in the next verse, because it is where the psalm lands. He describes himself as a weaned child with its mother, which is an image of somebody who is not crying for something and is simply present.

That is what he says the setting down produced. Not laziness. Quiet.

You were made for that quiet rather than for the exercising. That is what the written word says about matters that are genuinely above somebody, and it is the Spirit of God who makes three verses land in a woman who has been going round it on the same walk for four years.

This Is Not Anti-Intellectual And Nobody Is Being Diminished

Now be careful, because this article could be misread in two directions and both of them would be a disservice.

It is not saying the question is stupid. The two people who handed it to her are serious and the matter is serious and there are people whose actual calling is to work at exactly this kind of thing, and thank God for them.

And it is not saying Nerissa is incapable. She is not. She could work it out if she gave it the years, and that is precisely the point, because she has other things to give the years to and nobody appointed her to this.

Too high for me is not a statement about capacity. It is a statement about assignment.

You have a portion, and this may genuinely not be in it. It is written that we are to study to be quiet and to do our own business, which is a sentence about scope rather than about ability, and His Spirit is the one who has been on that walk with you every Thursday for four years.

And say the guard, since this whole site turns on it. Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no position, no side, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all. This site does not settle that argument either, does not lean, and does not think less of anybody on either side of it. You are as fully His with the bag set down and the question unresolved, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from putting something else in your hands.