Somebody Already Asked Me

Somebody already asked you.

Not in a formal way. It came out sideways at the end of a conversation, the way real things usually do. They said something like, you do not fancy doing ours, do you.

And you said something like, ha, any time, and then the conversation moved on and you both went home.

And then it happened again, about five weeks later, with the same person or with somebody else, and you did the same thing.

I want to be precise about what happened there, because I think you filed it wrong.

You heard it as politeness. As the kind of thing people say. And in fairness, people do say that kind of thing, so the reading was not unreasonable.

But people do not say it twice. That is the part I would like you to notice. Politeness does not repeat itself five weeks later.

You are being offered something and calling it small talk, and a question asked twice has never once been a person making conversation.

And I am not going to tell you that this person is going to hire you or that anything about your month changes because of it. I do not know these people.

What I am going to do is ask you to go back and look at something you have already been given, because this site would be wasting your time telling you to go and find new doors while there is one standing open behind you.

If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing

There is a moment where a commander is furious about an instruction that was too simple, and his own servants are the ones who talk him down.

And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean? (2 Kings 5:13, King James Version)

If he had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it.

That is the whole argument, and it is aimed exactly at your situation. A man who would have climbed a mountain is refusing to step in a river, and the reason is that the river was too ordinary to take seriously.

You are looking at a man who missed a plain instruction because it arrived without ceremony, and a thing offered casually has never once been a smaller thing than a thing offered formally. 2 Kings 5:13 says how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that correction in the mouths of servants rather than a prophet.

And notice who says it. Not Elisha. The men who worked for him, who were standing there, who could see what he could not.

You have people around you who can see the door you are walking past, and somebody plainer than you has never once been the wrong person to hear it from. The Holy Spirit is the one who speaks through the person standing nearest, and it is written in 2 Kings 5:13 that servants came near and said it.

Why a sideways offer gets missed

Let me explain the mechanism, because it is not stupidity and it happens to careful men more than careless ones.

A formal offer comes with a frame around it. A meeting, an email, a shape that says this is real, take it seriously.

A sideways offer has no frame. It arrives at a parking lot at the end of a Sunday, or in a doorway, or while somebody is putting a coat on. And a man who takes things seriously has been trained to look for the frame, and where there is no frame he assumes there is no thing.

You are looking for a shape that most real work never arrives in, and an offer made in a doorway has never once been less genuine than one made across a desk. The written word has an enormous thing handed over in a sentence about a river, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not require ceremony before something counts.

And there is a second reason, and it is the harder one.

A sideways offer can be walked away from by both parties without embarrassment. That is why people make them that way. They are testing the water and protecting themselves at the same time, and so are you.

Which means that if neither of you converts it, it will keep happening, sideways, forever.

You are in a standoff where both people are being careful, and a conversation that keeps nearly happening has never once resolved itself on its own. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves one person to say the plain thing first, and it is written that the servants went and said it to their master's face.

Go back to the one who already asked

So here is the assignment, and it is narrower than usual because the work has already been done for you.

Ask one person this week, out loud or in a message, if they need it done. And make it the person who already asked you.

Not a new person. Not the best prospect. The one who said it twice and got a laugh both times.

You are able to go back to somebody who already opened the subject, and returning to a conversation has never once been the same as starting one cold. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a man a door that was already ajar, and the written word has a man go down to the river in the end and do the small ordinary thing.

And the wording matters here, so let me say what it is not.

Do not open with an apology for not having taken them seriously. That makes it about the two laughs and drags the whole thing backwards.

Say the plain version. You mentioned yours a while back. I am doing that for people now. Do you still want it done.

You are able to say three plain sentences to somebody you already know, and a returned conversation has never once needed an explanation of the gap in the middle. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man the plain sentence, and 2 Kings 5:13 puts the whole correction into a single simple question.