For the organizer who stops at four columns every time and could not tell you why.
There's a space at the right hand end of that board about nine inches wide, and it has been blank for as long as the board has been up.
Four columns. Waiting, ready, out, back. Cards move left to right, everybody can read it from the door, and it has worked well enough that two other groups in that building have copied it.
Four is where you always stop. You have set up six boards in nine years, in three different rooms, for four different groups, and every single one of them has had four columns and a blank space at the end.
You could not tell anybody why. If pressed you'd say four is enough, which is true in the way that answers of that kind are true.
A ruling somebody made about other people is still setting the width of your board. Scripture says where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, while the Holy Spirit is at work in nine inches of blank cork.
Where Four Came From
Be exact about it, because you have obeyed this for nine years without ever looking at it in daylight.
There was a supervisor, early on, who said something about volunteers. The gist was that you cannot expect people who are not paid to maintain anything complicated, and that every extra step is a step somebody will skip, and that four is about the limit of what a rota can carry.
It was said with some authority and a good deal of experience behind it. It was probably even true of the particular group being discussed on the particular afternoon it was said.
What it became was a law about volunteers in general, applied by you, for nine years, to four different groups of people none of whom that supervisor ever met.
A judgment about one group in one season became a law about everybody. The written Word ties liberty to the Spirit of the Lord rather than to somebody's estimate of what people can manage, while the Holy Spirit works with volunteers who have never been assessed by anybody.
The Supervisor Who Set the Number
There is a version of this that goes looking for him, and it is not coming.
It would take that supervisor apart. It would point out how much that assumption has cost, and how patronizing it was about people who give their own time for nothing.
It would also leave you heavier and still stopping at four. It would land on somebody who made a reasonable observation about a difficult afternoon, with no idea that it would become an architecture.
You can be released from a ruling without prosecuting the person who made it. Scripture rests your liberty on the Spirit of the Lord rather than on somebody admitting something, while the Holy Spirit lifts weight off a person rather than adding to it.
Nothing here asks you to raise it, name anybody, or revisit nine years. The board gets lighter, and nobody else has to move first.
What a Fifth Column Does Not Have to Prove
There is another telling of this that goes wrong, and refusing it in advance saves trouble.
That version says the board has been held back. It says a fifth column will open up what the system could really be, that adoption will follow, that the whole arrangement will grow.
That is not on offer here, and if it were it would just be a different ceiling with a better mood. You might add a fifth column and find it genuinely does not help. You might add one, watch three people ignore it, and take it off in a fortnight.
Both of those are fine. The point is not the column. The point is that the decision about the width of your own board is currently being made by somebody who left, and that it can be made by you instead, whatever you then decide.
Freedom here is a decision returning to you, not a bigger board. The written Word puts liberty where the Spirit of the Lord is rather than in an outcome, while the Holy Spirit gives a freedom that is complete before anything is added to anything.
The test that keeps this honest is reversibility. One card, in pencil, that anybody can take off. A fifth column that cannot be removed by the next person is a fence rather than an experiment, and you have never built a fence in your life.
Where the Spirit of the Lord Is
There's a short line in the second letter to the Corinthians that says where liberty lives, and it does not put it where most of us look for it.
> Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. > 2 Corinthians 3:17 (KJV)
Liberty is located rather than achieved. It is not something you produce by being braver, and it is not waiting on the other side of a decision you have been failing to make for nine years.
It is where the Spirit of the Lord is, which means it is in the room you are standing in, at the board, with the blank nine inches on the right. The liberty was already there this morning while you were writing four columns.
That changes what today asks of you. Not the manufacture of freedom. The use of freedom that is already in the room, which is a considerably smaller and more available act.
Liberty is where the Spirit is, which means it was in the room before you were. The written Word locates freedom in His presence rather than in your nerve, while the Holy Spirit is standing at that corkboard already.
It is worth noticing what that does to the risk. If liberty is a room you are already standing in rather than a state you have to reach, then adding a column is not a leap out of safety. It is a small move inside a place you are already in.
And the move is reversible, which is the part the four years never let you consider. A fifth column that nobody maintains comes down in about ninety seconds, and the board returns to exactly what it was. Nothing about the test costs anybody anything, which makes the fear of it disproportionate to any outcome it could actually produce.
Four years of not finding that out is the only thing the number has actually cost anybody, and it is a cost nobody has ever been able to see, because a column that was never added leaves no mark on a board.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Say these as a woman already accounted for, out of a standing nobody assigned her. Whether a fifth column is adopted, and by whom, stays with God.
That limit is not mine and I do not live under it, and a number somebody named for a different team is not a rule over this one. The written Word of God says where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and liberty is the condition I am already in. I refuse the ceiling of four and I refuse it without laying a charge against the man who first said it. The Holy Spirit is at that board before I get there, out ahead of me. That four is behind me, and I work from here without it. Nobody has to use the fifth column for that to be true. My hand is up and touching nothing, and every column on that board is God's.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
2 Corinthians 3:17
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
