He Went First

Everybody in that room was waiting and Corinne knew exactly what they were waiting for, which is why she was standing at the edge of it with a paper cup.

Two hundred people. A very good evening. And a moment near the end where the man at the front said the thing you say and then stopped talking, and the room did what rooms do, which is that it held completely still.

Corinne has been to enough of these to know the mechanics. Somebody has to be first. Everybody in that room is prepared to be second. Second is easy and second is warm and by the time you are ninth it is barely a decision at all.

First costs something specific, and the cost is not courage in general. It is that the first person is visible in a way that nobody else in the room will be, and that everybody there will remember who moved, and that if it turns out to be the wrong reading of the moment then they were wrong publicly and alone.

She stood at the edge and she wanted to. That is the part she wants said. She was not resisting anything. She was doing the arithmetic that a person does about being seen.

Twenty seconds. Maybe thirty.

And then a boy went. He was about seventeen and had come with somebody and did not seem to have thought about it at all, and he was down the middle of that room before the arithmetic in Corinne's head had finished its second circuit.

Eleven people followed him inside a minute. She was one of them. She was somewhere around fifth.

She said afterwards that she has thought about that boy more than about anything else that evening. Not because he was brave, although he was, but because of the mechanics of what he did.

Once somebody has gone, there is no first left to be. He had removed it. Everybody after him got to make a decision that had had the specific cost taken out of it by somebody who went before them.

You may be standing at that edge too, wherever your version of it is. And the thing keeping you there is usually not doubt about the direction, it is the specific and reasonable cost of being visible before anybody else has moved. And nobody has ever told you what the word firstfruits does to that arithmetic.

Firstfruits Means Somebody Has Already Gone

There is a title given to Christ in the middle of the great resurrection chapter, and it is the same word this entire site is built around.

"But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept."1 Corinthians 15:20

Firstfruits.

It is a harvest word. It means the part that comes up before the rest of the crop, and its whole significance is that it comes first and therefore tells you what is coming.

Paul does not call Him an example. He does not call Him a demonstration. He uses an agricultural word about sequence, and the sequence is: this one has already come up, and the field is behind it.

You are in the crop rather than at the front of it. 1 Corinthians 15 gives Christ a sequence title and puts everybody else after Him in the same harvest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it at the edge of a room where two hundred people are holding still.

And think about what that does to the arithmetic. If the first has already come up, then nobody after it is first. The specific cost, the one that is about being visible and alone and possibly wrong in front of everybody, has been taken by somebody who went ahead.

You have not been asked to be first at anything, because the position is taken. That is what the written word says about where Christ stands in relation to everybody else, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a harvest word land in a woman with a paper cup at the edge of a room.

Nothing At The End Of This Asks Anything Of You

Now say it plainly, because this is the landing category and how these pages finish is the guarantee this whole site is built on.

Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no schedule, no commitment, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

And in particular, this article is not asking you to be like the boy. That is what an article about a room like that usually does in its last section, and this one is not doing it, because the whole point of the passage is that somebody has already removed the first position and you do not have to occupy it.

You are not being sent to the front of anything. It is written that He is the firstborn among many brethren, which puts Him at the front and everybody else in the same family behind Him, and His Spirit is the one who has been at the edge of that room with you for the whole twenty seconds.

And you are as fully His standing at the edge with a paper cup, because the sequence in 1 Corinthians 15 is a fact about Him rather than a task for you, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from putting you in the middle of a floor.