The Cost He Counted

He gave up the post

After Namirembe, Nsibambi resigned his public health job and gave himself to prayer and preaching. That much is agreed on by everyone who tells the story.

He did not do it alone, and he did not drift. He gathered others. A group formed around him in Kampala who were known as the Abaka — the men of fire — men who had come into the same experience and would not keep quiet about it. Among them was his own younger brother, Blasio Kigozi, whom Nsibambi brought into a living faith and who would shortly go south to join Joe Church at Gahini. What had been one man's private hunger was becoming a company.

What nobody records is the part we would most like to know. We do not know how long he thought about resigning, whether Eva agreed, what it did to the household, whether anyone talked him out of it and failed, or whether he ever regretted it. He and Eva had a large family — twelve children in the end, among them a son, Apolo, who would one day be Prime Minister of Uganda. A man with that many mouths to feed does not walk away from a government salary absent-mindedly.

So we have the decision without the deliberation. We know what he did and not what it cost him, which is the reverse of how we normally hear such stories, and probably healthier.

Against the version you have heard before

The way this kind of story usually gets told, the sacrifice is presented as easy — the man was so full of joy that the salary simply stopped mattering. That telling is popular because it is comfortable. It removes the cost by removing the weight of what was given up.

There is no evidence for it here, and some reason to doubt it. His neighbours evidently thought he had lost his mind, which is not the reaction people have to a decision that looks obviously sensible. Whatever the inside of it was like, from the outside it looked like a respectable man throwing away the thing he had spent his life acquiring.

Do not let anyone sell you the frictionless version. If following God has never cost you anything you actually wanted, you may not yet have been asked. When you are, it will feel like a loss, because it will be one.

What he was not doing

It is worth being careful here, because this chapter could easily become a sermon telling you to quit your job, and that would be a misreading.

Nsibambi did not resign because employment is unspiritual. He had held that post for years as a believing man, and the work itself — keeping a city's water and waste from killing its people — is about as plain a piece of loving your neighbour as a job can be. Nothing suggests he came to think it was beneath him.

He resigned because he had been given something he could not hold and also hold on to everything else. That is a different thing from despising ordinary work. Most people who have been genuinely changed by God stay exactly where they are and are different there. Some do not. The question is not which category is holier. The question is whether there is anything you have decided in advance that God may not ask for.

The thing that is actually being asked

Because that is the transferable part. Almost none of us will be asked to resign a post. All of us have a list.

The list is usually unspoken and quite short, and you can find it by noticing where you go quiet when you pray. There is the plan you have made for the next ten years. There is the standard of living you have come to regard as the floor rather than the ceiling. There is the relationship you would keep even if you were shown it was doing you harm. There is the reputation you have built and would find it very hard to be thought a fool in front of.

You do not have to give any of those away this afternoon. But you might ask yourself honestly whether you have put them outside the negotiation — whether, in the quiet arithmetic you actually run your life by, they are simply not on the table.

Because the decision Nsibambi made was not really made on the day he resigned. It was made earlier, when he stopped keeping a list of exceptions. The resignation was just where it became visible.

Counted, not swept aside

Jesus told people to sit down and work out the cost before building the tower, which is a strange thing for Him to say if the cost were nothing. He assumed it would be real and expected them to look at it squarely first.

So do that. Not with the pretence that it will not hurt. Count it. Name the thing. Ask whether you believe that what God gives is worth more than what He asks for — not in the abstract, where everyone says yes, but in the specific case, with the actual figure in front of you.

Nsibambi seems to have concluded that it was. He was not, by any account, a reckless man. He was a sanitation officer; his whole professional life had been careful. He counted, and then he went.

A prayer

Lord, I keep a quiet list of things I have decided You may not ask for. You know every item on it better than I do. I am not brave enough to hand it over all at once, so begin with one: show me which, and make me willing before I am asked. Amen.