You Were Not Left Out, You Were Picked Out

There is a specific feeling that most people never find words for, and I want to try to find them, because I think naming it does half the work.

It is the feeling of standing slightly outside something, and not being able to tell whether you were moved out or left out.

The two feel identical from the inside. That is the whole problem. If a hand takes you out of a room deliberately, and if a room simply closes over the space where you used to be, you end up standing in the same corridor either way, and the corridor does not tell you which one happened.

And when you cannot tell, you will always guess the worse one. Everybody does. It is not weak faith. It is what a human being does with an ambiguous fact at eleven at night.

So a person who has been set apart, genuinely and by God, will very often spend years quietly filing it as rejection, and will keep going faithfully the whole time, and will never once say the word out loud to anybody, because saying it would sound ungrateful.

Moses names the thing nobody wanted named

Deuteronomy is a series of talks given to a people who have every reason to think they were picked because they were worth picking. They have come through a great deliverance. They are on the edge of a land. And Moses stops and takes that idea away from them in the plainest sentence in the book.

The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you. (Deuteronomy 7:7-8, King James Version)

Sit with the middle clause. Ye were the fewest of all people.

He is not being harsh. He is removing an explanation before it can grow. Because if they think they were chosen for their size, then two things follow: they will be proud while they are strong, and they will assume they have been dropped the moment they are small.

And He takes away the merit, and then He puts something in its place that cannot be measured or lost. Because the LORD loved you.

You were not selected on a measurement, and there is no number you can fall below. Deuteronomy 7:7 says ye were the fewest of all people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as safety rather than as an insult.

Fewest is not the same as leftover

Now I want to be careful with a word, because a picture lives or dies on one word here.

Fewest is not leftover. They sound close and they are opposites.

Leftover is what is not chosen. It is what remains after the choosing is done, and it is defined entirely by the absence of a decision about it. Nobody picked it. That is its whole story.

Fewest is a description of size, given in a sentence whose entire subject is a decision. The smallness is not why they were chosen and it is not evidence against being chosen. It is simply true about them, and it is stated in the middle of the most deliberate sentence in the chapter.

Here is the picture I would give you. There is a difference between a coat left on a hook at the end of the night, and a coat taken off a rail by somebody who came in looking for that one. Both coats end up out of the row. Only one of them is holding a decision.

You are holding a decision, and you were not what remained after everybody else was taken. The written word says because the LORD loved you, and the Spirit of God is the one who can put a whole different meaning into the same corridor a person has been standing in for years.

Why it keeps feeling like the other thing

I do not want to pretend a good sentence fixes this, because it does not, and if I promise that you will close this page and be disappointed in an hour.

Here is why the feeling persists even after you believe the doctrine, and why Deuteronomy 7:8 gives the reason a second time rather than assuming once was plenty, and why the Holy Spirit is not impatient with the repeating.

Being chosen by God is invisible, and being left out by people is visible. One of them has evidence you can see from where you are standing: the group photograph you are not in, the plan somebody made without you, the room that has clearly got on fine. The other one has no visible evidence at all. It is a sentence in a book and a Person you cannot see.

So the visible thing wins most evenings, and it will keep winning most evenings, until the invisible thing gets said out loud often enough to become a fact you carry rather than a fact you look up.

That is not a technique. It is just how a human being comes to know something.

You are not slow to believe this, and there is nothing wrong with you for needing it said again. Deuteronomy 7:8 gives the reason a second time in the very next verse rather than assuming once was enough, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is patient with a person on the fortieth telling.