My Whole Story Is What I Left

The hall is empty except for two people stacking chairs at the far end and a boy winding a cable around his elbow. The microphone stand is still up in the middle of the floor with nothing in it, which is a strange thing to look at, like a coat hook with the coat gone.

Renata is picking up her bag from under the front row and she is not in a hurry.

It went well. It always goes well. She has been doing this for nine years and she knows the shape of it now the way you know a hymn: where the room goes quiet, where somebody at the back puts a hand over their mouth, where to slow down, where to stop and let it sit. She does not perform it. She means every word. That is exactly what makes it work.

And it is all about what she came out of.

The whole thing. Eighteen minutes, and seventeen of them are the before, and the last minute is a turn and a thank you and a verse, and then the room stands up and somebody prays and somebody hugs her at the door and says, thank you for being so honest.

A girl came up tonight, maybe nineteen, and stood in front of her with her hands in her sleeves, and did not ask about the before. She said: so what do you do now?

And Renata heard herself say, oh, this. Meaning the speaking. Meaning telling people about the before.

The girl smiled and said that was really nice and went off to find her friends, and Renata has been standing here since, near the front row, with her bag in her hand.

Nine years. Nobody has asked her that before. Not once. And what has landed on her, standing in an emptying hall, is not that the girl asked. It is that she did not have an answer, and she has never noticed that she did not have one, because nobody in nine years has ever gone looking for the second half of her sentence.

She knows exactly what she was brought out of. She could draw you a map of it.

She has never once said, out loud, in any room, what she was brought out for.

Somebody switches off the lights at the far end and the hall goes down to the working lights, and the microphone stand is still standing there in the middle of the floor.

You know the sentence I am talking about. Maybe you have never told it from a platform. Maybe you tell it to one person at a time, in a kitchen, when they need to hear that somebody got out. Either way you have a story with a strong first half, and you have said it so many times that you have stopped noticing it does not go anywhere.

You have been introducing yourself by what you left for years. And if somebody stood in front of you tonight with their hands in their sleeves and asked what you are for, you would hear the silence before they did.

He said the second half on the first day

Paul is standing in front of a king, telling the story he has told a hundred times, and he gets to the road and the light and the voice. Listen to what the voice actually says, because most of us have only ever kept the first line of it.

But rise and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of the things which I will yet reveal to you.Acts 26:16

Rise and stand on your feet. That is the part everybody remembers, and it is the getting out. And then, without a pause, in the same breath, the purpose: to appoint you a minister and a witness.

Not later. Not once he had proved something. On the road, on the day, while he was still on the ground and could not see. The out and the for arrived together.

You are appointed, and the appointing happened on the same day as the rescue. That is not a compliment I am paying you. Acts 26:16 says He appeared for this purpose, to appoint a minister and a witness, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the lift of the sentence, who carries that into an emptying hall with a microphone stand still up in it.

And look at the last clause, because it is the one nobody quotes. A witness of the things which you have seen, and of the things which I will yet reveal to you.

Two halves, and they were both in the commission from the start. What you have seen is your before, and He honors it, and He puts it in the job description without embarrassment. And then there is a whole second category of things, and they were not behind him on that road. They were in front of him. He had not seen them yet.

You have a commission with an open half in it, and the open half is not a reward for finishing the first one. His word says a witness of what you have seen and of what He will yet reveal, and His Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to stand in a room and say a sentence about the future without flinching.

The trap this closes

Now I have to be careful with you, because there is a way of hearing all this that would put you straight back where you started, only tired.

Purpose is not repayment.

Nobody is telling you that because you were bought, you now owe a life of usefulness, and that the way you settle it is by making your rescue count. That is the exact thing this message exists to close. If your purpose is a way of making up for your past, then your past is still running the room, only now it is running it from underneath and wearing a nicer word.

You are given a purpose the same way you were given the rescue, and neither one arrived with a condition attached. Scripture says He appeared to appoint a minister and a witness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person receive an assignment as a gift instead of taking it on as an obligation.

And the before does not get tidied away either. Paul told his in front of a king, in detail, and he was not ashamed of it and he was not defined by it. The record stands and the verdict is changed. Every year of your before is still true, still yours, still yours to tell, and none of it is the answer to what you are for.

That girl asked a real question and it deserves a real answer, and the answer is not the platform. The answer is not even the story. The story is a thing you carry. It is not a place you live.

You have been sent somewhere, and being sent is different from being famous for having escaped. It is written that He appointed him a minister and a witness of what he had seen and of what would yet be revealed, and the same Spirit who fell on the church is the one who puts a hand in the small of a woman's back and moves her forward.