He Assumes He Is Finished

He is on his knees at the gate with a screwdriver in his teeth, because the latch has been catching all winter and this is the Saturday he decided it stops.

The old latch is out. The new one is in the packet on the path beside him with the little screws in a plastic bag, and he has already lost one of them in the grass and found it, and that is the current state of the morning. There is a coffee on the gatepost going cold. The hedge needs doing. He will get to the hedge.

Somebody says his name from the sidewalk.

It is one of the younger men from church, the one with the beard, out walking with a stroller in front of him and a kid in it who is asleep in the way that only moving children sleep. They do the whole thing. Nice morning. Latch trouble. That hedge. Kid sleeping, thank goodness.

And then the younger man says the actual reason he stopped.

There is a group of men who meet on Thursdays. Nothing formal. About nine of them, a couple of them going through a rough patch, one who is in a great deal of trouble in a way that the younger man does not describe. And he wonders whether he might come. Not to run anything. Just to sit in.

And here is what happens on the inside of the man with the screwdriver, and it takes about a second and a half.

He hears the request. Something in his chest actually lifts. And then a second thing, older and faster, comes down on top of the first thing and puts it out, the way you put a lid on a pan.

He laughs. He says something like: you don't want me for that. Then he says the sentence he has been saying for years, in various forms, and it always comes out sounding like modesty and it always ends the conversation. He says: mine's an old story. Twelve years old. It's not much of a story any more.

The younger man says the polite thing back, and says think about it, and goes on down the sidewalk with the stroller, and the kid does not wake up.

He goes back to the latch.

And he does the new one badly, actually, because he is not paying attention, and he has to take it off and start over, and while he is doing that he notices something he has never let himself notice before.

Nobody has asked him in four years. And before that, when they did ask, he had already started saying no.

Because there was a season, a long time ago now, when they asked him constantly. When he first came out of it he was the story of that building. They put him up front. He told it, and it was raw and it was recent and people cried, and men came and found him afterward in the parking lot and stood there and could not speak. He remembers it perfectly. It was the most useful he has ever felt in his life.

Then the years did what years do. The story got older. He got ordinary. He is a man who fixes a latch on a Saturday now. And somewhere in there, without ever deciding it, he came to a conclusion that has governed his whole life since, and the conclusion is this: that his usefulness to God was the drama, and the drama is over.

He knows what he was bought out of. He can tell you to the month.

He has never once, in twelve years, given a single thought to what he was bought for.

And I suspect you have not either. You are years free of it now, whatever it was, and I am not asking. You are steady. You are grateful, genuinely. And you sign up for nothing, and you volunteer for nothing, and when somebody asks you, you make it into a joke and you say your story is old.

The Day It Stopped Being Dramatic

Somewhere along the way you absorbed a piece of arithmetic that nobody ever said out loud to you, and it is wrong, and it has quietly closed down the second half of your life.

The arithmetic is this: that a man is useful to God in proportion to how good his testimony sounds when it is told. That the value is in the contrast, the before and the after, the gasp in the room. And therefore that as the contrast fades, so does the man.

By that arithmetic every one of us has a peak and then a long slope down, and the most useful Christian in any building is the one who got out of the worst thing most recently. Say it plainly like that and you can hear that it is nonsense. But you have been living by it for twelve years.

You are not a story whose shelf life ran out, and you never were one. I am not flattering you here. Scripture says the One who began a good work in you is the One carrying it through, which puts the ongoing work in His hands and not in your material, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a better opinion of yourself, who takes that off a page and out to a man kneeling at a gate.

And notice what actually happened, because it was not a demotion. What happened is that you got well. The drama went out of your life because the danger went out of your life, and that is what everybody was praying for, and you have interpreted the answer to those prayers as your own retirement.

You have been reading your own healing as a redundancy notice. His word says the good work in you is being performed by the One who started it, and the same Spirit who did the starting has not been reassigned somewhere else.

Begun, and Nowhere Near Finished

Paul writes this to people he loves, and he is careful about who the subject of the sentence is:

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

He which hath begun. Not you which hast begun. The whole confidence in that sentence rests on the identity of the worker, and the worker is not the man being worked on.

And look at the word begun. The day you came out of it was not the completion of anything. It was the opening. You have been treating a beginning as a summit and then wondering why the view has been going downhill ever since.

You are in the middle of something that God started and has not put down. Philippians 1:6 says He which hath begun a good work carries it through to the day of Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as an address to a man with a screwdriver rather than a verse on a card.

Now here is the trap this whole site exists to close, and I want it named out loud before you take one step further, because this is where men like you get hurt.

Purpose is not repayment.

What you are being called toward on that Thursday is not you making it up to God. It is not you working off the twelve years before. It is not the useful half of your life balancing the wasted half so that the whole comes out acceptable. If anybody hands you that, including your own head at four in the morning, put it down. The thing you were bought out of was settled by somebody else, entirely, with no contribution from you, and it stays settled whether you go on Thursday or not.

And the record stands and the verdict is changed. Nobody is deleting the twelve years, or the years before them either. Your history is intact and it is honest and it is not being edited. What has changed is what it means about your future, and it turns out it means nothing about your future at all, because your future was never being calculated from your past. It was begun by Him.

You have been bought for something and not only out of something. It is written that He which began the good work performs it, and the Spirit is the one who holds that steady in a man on the mornings when the phone does not ring.