The Night the Tables Kept Filling

They call me Belle at the bookstore.

It began as a joke and settled into a kind of second identity, as nicknames sometimes do.It made sense because I am always in that store. The staff know my name and my order and which aisles I am in when I’m not seeking a particular book. At some point one of them made the comparison and it never left. There are worse things to be called than the girl who is always in the bookstore.

For years I ran role-playing games there.

When that run came to its natural close I stood in my own living room one evening taking stock of my shelves. Dozens of board games. A good many still sealed. Games purchased because they were beautiful and then never opened, because I had nobody to open them with.

Not everyone will sit down for a campaign. That asks something of a person. But there is a board game suited to nearly every temperament, and most of mine are the approachable sort, with short rulebooks and simple teaches.

So I asked the bookstore for a table. Two, to be careful.

I posted about it in a couple of small Christian groups and nowhere else. The replies came in at a handful. I told the store it would be a small and cozy affair, that two tables would be more than sufficient, since most of what I own plays two to five. They added it to the event calendar on their website passively, on the chance a few strangers might see it and wander in.

Then I watched the two tables fill before the evening had properly begun.

They set out two more, and those filled. Two more after that. I remember standing with a stack of boxes against my chest, scanning the room, watching what I thought was a conservative plan unravel before me.

By the end there were near a hundred people. I had planned for five. I had brought what I was certain was an embarrassing surplus of games and did not have enough.

Everyone wished to meet me. Everyone wanted a seat at whatever table I sat at. I spent the whole night being drawn from group to group, teaching rules, collecting names I had no hope of keeping, receiving thanks I could not account for. When it was over the praise was effusive and the requests immediate: not only come again, but come again and bring more. The owners were glowing. I watched them take in the register and the crowd and the sheer number of bodies in a bookstore on a weeknight, and I was genuinely just so, so glad for them.

Then everyone went home, and I stood in the middle of that emptied room feeling something near to whiplash.

And I did not want any of it. Here’s what I mean:

I have written before about the wings I keep attempting to hide and how much I want to be behind the stage. I have always wanted to be behind the stage. Build the thing, and let someone else stand in front of it.

But I have been walking with God long enough to know that what filled that room was not attributable to my planning. My planning accounted for 5 people and a card table.

At Bible study this week my pastor said he believes this is only the beginning of what God intends to do through me if I would stop resisting. Stop resisting Him. Stop resisting discomfort. Stop resisting being set somewhere visible.

I have been chewing on that idea for a few days, so I thought I would write about my thought process around it.

Moses is the passage everyone reaches for, and I understand why, though it often gets flattened in how its often talked about.

He raises a few objections across Exodus 3 and 4. Who am I. What is Your name, meaning what authority do I carry. They will not believe me. I am slow of speech and of tongue. And then, when the arguments have run dry, the plainest one of all: “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else” (4:13).

The first four are attempts at reasoning. The fifth is only a request, and it is the request I recognize, because I have been making it.

What holds me is God’s answer. He does not tell Moses the objections are unfounded. He never says you are eloquent, in fact. He supplies signs and He supplies Aaron; He works around the stated limitation rather than arguing it away. But at the fifth objection His anger is kindled (4:14), and the sending stands. The resistance was heard and It was accommodated in certain respects, but the assignment itself didnt actually change.

That being said: there is a version of “stop resisting” that does harm, and I have watched it applied to women in particular.

It becomes a way of telling a person that every hesitation is disobedience, that discomfort is always the flesh, that any reluctance to be visible must be a form of pride. That reading leaves no room for legitimate limits, and it manufactures people who burn themselves down and then conclude the burning was a spiritual failure.

Some invitations ought to be declined. Christ withdrew constantly (Luke 5:16), and the withdrawing was not an interruption of the ministry. It belonged to it.

So the question is not whether reluctance can ever be valid. Clearly it can. The question is how a person discerns whether a particular reluctance is wisdom or evasion.

What I have arrived at, for now, is a distinction about where the no originates.

The exhausted no comes after the yes. It rises out of having poured out and needing filling, and it usually points at something specific: this commitment, this season, this quantity. It is a boundary drawn around capacity, and capacity is a fact about a person rather than a preference.

The no I felt in that bookstore was not that I don’t think. Nothing had actually drained me. The evening had gone beautifully and had cost me an evening. What rose in me was not tiredness. It was the reflex of someone who does not wish to be looked at, firing in a room where a hundred people were looking at her and enjoying themselves.

Because when I read how God actually distributes assignments, the preferences of the assigned dont really hold that much weight:

• Jeremiah protests that he is only a youth and does not know how to speak, and is told not to say it (Jeremiah 1:6-7).
• Gideon observes that he is the least in his father’s house and his clan the weakest in Manasseh, and the angel does not dispute the assessment, only its relevance (Judges 6:15-16).
• Jonah’s preference was strong enough to put him on a ship pointed the other way, and the account treats that preference as an obstacle rather than a consideration.

Paul comes nearest to explaining why. Given a thorn to keep him from conceit, he asked three times for its removal and was answered: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The perfecting occurs within the weakness, not once the weakness has been cleared away.

Perhaps my reluctance may be the very weakness through which something is meant to be demonstrated, rather than a disqualification to be resolved before the work can start.

Even after wrestling with all this, I still do not want wings. But there are things about that night I cannot get to leave me alone:

1. The evening succeeded in spite of my planning, not because of it. I prepared for five. A hundred came. Whatever produced that was not my competence with logistics.
2. The games sitting sealed on my shelves, bought across years for a life I did not have and people I had not met, turned out to be the supplies. I had been stocking a room I could not see. I hold the interpretation loosely, but I notice it.
3. And the resistance did not arrive until after the last person left. While it was happening I was teaching rules and laughing and thoroughly enjoying myself. The dread was retrospective. Which makes me suspect the thing I fear is not the work but being observed at the work, and those two are separable in a way I had not distinguished before.

My pastor may be right that this is a beginning. He may also be reading more into one bookstore night than it is and its just something born out of enthusiasm.

What I can say is that I have spent years arranging my life so as not to be conspicuous, and that consistently has kept failing. The bookstore is only the most recent instance…. I did everything I knew to keep it small and it grew anyway.

At some point the repetition ceases to look like coincidence and begins to look like calling

I might be totally wrong. I hold this with a hand open enough to be corrected. But I have begun to think the hill I keep trying to climb down from is not one I was consulted about, and that my discomfort standing on it has never once been the deciding factor.

In the meanwhile, I’ll keep walking through the door. Apparently that is sufficient for God to work with, even when I would rather He had chosen somebody who wanted the post.