Theodore Roosevelt once described two kinds of success:
"There are two kinds of success. One is the very rare kind that comes to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do. That is genius. But the average man who wins what we call success is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellow, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."
I read that and mind mind was strangely disturbed and it took me a while to work out what it was. I have spent a good portion of my life quietly waiting to turn out to be the first kind. Not consciously, I never said it out loud, and I would have denied it if you'd asked. But it lived underneath the way I measured my days. Somewhere in me was a belief that the work I was really made for would announce itself eventually and there was a gift I hadn't discovered yet, some capacity that would finally make my contribution obvious. And until it showed up, what I was doing was preparation. Not the thing itself.
The model we never actually teach
The church has its own version of Roosevelt's genius, and we never say it from the platform because we don't have to, everyone can feel it. It's the person whose testimony is dramatic enough to be worth telling. The one with the gift that draws a crowd. The speaker who can hold a room. We celebrate radical transformation stories and give the microphone to people who can articulate faith persuasively, and without meaning to, we inadvertently model thoughts where the extraordinary ones do the real work, and there is everyone else, who supports them. I have sat in the second group for most of my adult life and assumed it was temporary.
The role is already filled
This quote helped me delineate who I am in Christ as a disciple. Roosevelt's genius is the one "who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do." In the Christian story, that power has been exercised. Once, completely, and by someone who is not me. There is no second opening. Nobody is auditioning for it. The one thing no one else could do has been done, and it was done on a cross by the only person qualified to do it. Every one of us stands permanently, structurally in Roosevelt's second category, not because we came up short, but because that is the design.
Paul says it more bluntly than I would dare: "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" (1 Corinthians 1:26). He is not apologizing for the church's roster. He is explaining it.
What the exemption actually does
I used to hear this as a consolation prize. You're not the genius, but don't worry, God can still use you. Cheerful, and slightly demeaning. I don't hear it that way anymore. I hear it as a release. If I am never going to be the one who does what no one else can do, then I can stop waiting to find out whether I am. That question is closed. Which means the enormous amount of attention I was spending on it by measuring myself, scanning for the hidden gift, wondering if I'd missed my moment is suddenly available for something else. It's available for the ordinary qualities I already have.
Roosevelt says the man who wins what we call success has "merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellow." Merely. I love that word, because it refuses to flatter. He isn't saying you have secret greatness. He's saying you have the same equipment as everybody around you, and the only variable left is what you do with it. That is a description of followership. It is not the runner-up position and is the only position there is.
Three questions I had to sit with
Which spiritual gift do I secretly wish I had and what does wanting it tell me about who I think does the real work?
When I imagine being genuinely useful to God, am I picturing something only I could do?
And if I am never going to be the genius, what exactly have I been waiting for permission to start?
That last one is the expensive question. Because the honest answer, for me, was that I had been waiting a long time. And nothing was ever going to arrive.
Where this leaves me
I keep returning to how relieved I felt reading that quote, and I think it's because Roosevelt handed me an exemption I didn't know I was allowed to have. I am exempt from being extraordinary. Not excused from the work and released from the pretense that the work was ever going to look impressive. What's left is smaller than I imagined and considerably harder. Ordinary qualities, developed further than ordinary. Showing up on a Tuesday. Doing the next thing in front of me without checking whether anyone noticed.
I no longer think that's the lesser calling. I think it is the whole of it.
