Everybody Follows Her and Nobody Sits With Her

Fourth lunch this week in the stairwell between the second and third floors, which nobody uses because there is a better staircase forty feet away.

She is seventeen. Walk her down a corridor and a great many people say her name. Not in a way she has engineered; she is not running anything and she would be genuinely upset to be called popular in the way that word is usually meant. A lot of people know who she is, a good number would say they are friends with her, and about eleven would say it with real warmth.

And she is eating lunch on a stair.

Not because anybody has done anything. There is no exclusion here, no falling out, nothing that would show up if a teacher went looking. She could walk into that cafeteria in ninety seconds and sit down at three different tables and be welcomed at all of them and it would be entirely genuine.

She is on the stair because at some point in about March she worked out that she could not think of one person she could say a true thing to.

Not a big thing. A true thing. Something current about how she actually is, said to a face, without it being funny.

And she went through the whole list, which took a while because the list is long, and she got to the end of it, and there was nobody on it. Not because they are bad people. Because every relationship on that list runs on a particular register and she has been fluent in that register since she was about thirteen and she does not know how to change gear inside one of them.

And then, sitting on that stair in March, she worked out the second thing, which is the one that has kept her coming back to the stairwell for four months.

The reason the list is long is the reason there is nobody on it. Being that many people's friend is a full-time job, and the way you do it is by being extremely easy to be around, and being extremely easy to be around means never once putting anything on the table that anybody would have to do something with.

She has been paying for the length of the list with exactly the thing she now wants.

And you know that stairwell. You would rather be looked at than known, and you may not have chosen it, and it may have started as nothing more than being good at people, and the bill for it is a lunch period on a staircase.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not fake and there is nothing wrong with you. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and it is finished and it is thorough, and the Holy Spirit is in this stairwell with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The point is how small the detail is

There is a line about God knowing people that gets quoted a lot and is almost always heard as being about size, and it is not.

But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.Luke 12:7

The hairs of your head.

Now, God knowing the number of anything is not impressive. Of course He knows. If the point were the scale of His knowledge, He could have picked something that sounds grander: the stars, the sea, the number of days in a life.

He picked something absurdly small. Something nobody would ever count. Something with no significance whatsoever and no use to anybody and no reason for anyone, ever, to have made a note of it.

That is the point. Not the size of the knowledge, the size of the detail. He is describing attention so complete that it has taken in the parts of you that not only nobody knows, but that nobody would have any reason to want to know.

Which is exactly the material a person on a staircase is carrying. Not dramatic things, mostly. Small, current, unglamorous things about how you actually are, of the kind you cannot put into a conversation because they are not interesting enough to justify changing the register for.

They are already counted.

You are known down to details nobody would ever have thought worth counting. The written word picks the least significant countable thing about a person to make the point, which means the smallness of what you are carrying has never once put it below His attention; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a stairwell between the second and third floors.

And notice the two words in the middle of it. Fear not therefore. Therefore. He treats being known at that depth as the reason to stop being afraid, which is the opposite of how most people would expect it to work.

You did not build this on purpose

I want to be fair to how this happened, because you are seventeen and you will otherwise conclude you have done something wrong, and you have not.

You did not construct a strategy. Nobody sits down at thirteen and decides to become widely liked and inaccessible. What happens is much more ordinary: you turn out to be good with people, and being good with people is rewarded immediately and continuously by everybody, and the specific skill inside it that gets rewarded most is being easy.

And nobody, at any point in four years, has said to you that the skill has a cost, because from the outside it does not look like it has one. It looks like the best possible outcome.

So you have spent four years getting better and better at something that works, and the bill arrived in March, and you have been sitting on a staircase with it since, and there is not one adult in that building who would guess it.

You were not being false, and the skill was rewarded so consistently that nobody mentioned the price. Luke 12:6 says not one of the sparrows is forgotten before God, and forgotten there is about what slips out of view rather than what is deliberately dismissed; His Spirit is the one who does not lose track of people, and He is not grading how you have handled being liked.

And here is the second half, and I want to be clear about it, because you are seventeen and pages like this can do damage.

Nothing here is going to tell you what to say, or to whom, or that you should tell your parents, or a teacher, or one of the eleven. That is yours entirely and it stays yours, and anybody who tells a seventeen-year-old from a distance what to disclose and to whom is being careless with your life.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and nobody gets to choose either for you. Ecclesiastes 4:9 says two are better than one, and it names a number rather than a candidate; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been on that staircase for four months of lunch periods.

And I will say this plainly, because it matters more than the rest of the page. If what you are carrying is heavier than a stairwell, if it is about being hurt or being unsafe or about not wanting to be here, tell a safe adult today and do not wait for the right one. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a real person will answer, and you do not have to explain anything about school to them.

One person, not the list

Here is the practical thing, and it goes against everything you are good at.

The instinct, for somebody with your skills, is to fix this at the level of the list. To go back into that cafeteria and be slightly more real with everybody, gradually, so that the whole thing shifts a little.

That will not work and it will exhaust you. The register is set by the group and it is very stable, and one person trying to change it from inside gets absorbed.

What works is one person, chosen deliberately, outside the pattern if possible, and one true sentence said to them on purpose.

And one is genuinely enough. You do not need eleven. Almost nobody has eleven. Most people who look completely fine to you have one, and they got that one on purpose, and it took a specific and slightly awkward conversation that nobody enjoyed at the time.

You need one and not a list, and one is a smaller thing than you have been picturing. Scripture says the very hairs of your head are all numbered, and fear not therefore, which puts being fully known as the ground for not being afraid; the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you company on a staircase since March.

So the stairwell is not where you have ended up because something is wrong with you. It is a quiet staircase forty feet from a busier one, and a girl on it who is genuinely liked by a great many people, and who needs one of them, or somebody else entirely, and only one.