I Am The Only One Left

She has counted, and she got to one, and the one is her.

Not out of arrogance, and if you suggested arrogance she would look at you like you had lost your mind. She counted the way a tired person counts, which is by scanning the room she is standing in and drawing a conclusion about the world.

Her room is her family, her work and one church.

In her family, nobody. At work, she is fairly sure nobody, though she has not asked. And at the church there are people who attend, and she has decided, in a judgment she would be ashamed to hear read back, that attending is not the same thing.

So: one. Her.

And it has made her heavy in a way she cannot put down. Because if you are the last one, then everything depends on you not stopping. You cannot have a bad year. You cannot rest.

She is forty-one and she has been carrying a whole tradition on her back for six of those years, in a town where she has never once asked a direct question of anybody.

And her count is wrong. Not slightly. By orders of magnitude.

So let me ask you.

How many did you count, and how did you count them?

He said it twice and got a number back

There is a man in 1 Kings who has just done the most public thing of his life and then collapsed under a bush and asked to die, and when God asks him what is wrong he says a sentence, and then a few verses later he says the identical sentence again.

The sentence is: I am the only one left.

And what he gets back is not comfort. It is a headcount.

Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.1 Kings 19:18

Seven thousand.

Not seven thousand who will be raised up later. Seven thousand who were already there, the entire time, while he was under the bush doing his arithmetic.

1 Kings 19 answers a man's loneliness with a number of people who existed the whole while he was counting, and the Spirit was in that answer, so the total you arrived at has never once been a report about the world.

Now, sweetheart, let me be plain with you, and gentle, because you are tired and tired people do not need to be corrected sharply.

Your count is not a lie. You are not making it up. You genuinely scanned what you could see. 1 Kings 19 still answers that arithmetic with seven thousand who were already standing, and the Spirit had kept every one of them Himself.

But look at your method. You counted your family, your workplace and one building, and you did not ask a single person a direct question in any of them, and then you extrapolated from that to everybody alive.

1 Kings 19 has God correcting the count rather than the man's feelings, and the Spirit answered him with arithmetic instead of reassurance, which means six years of carrying a whole tradition alone rests entirely on a survey you never actually ran.

And there is one more thing in that verse that I want to put in your hand.

I reserve. The seven thousand are His doing, not a coincidence and not a happy accident of the era.

1 Kings 19 makes the keeping of those seven thousand something God says He did, and the Spirit was in that reserving, so the survival of this has never once depended on you not having a bad year.