She Was Given a Life, Not a Job

The cow parsley is up past her elbow on both sides, and there is a place about two thirds of the way down where the hedge thins and you can see the whole valley at once, and she stops there every morning without ever having decided to.

The lane runs from the top of her road down to the church and the postbox and back. Twenty five minutes if she does the loop. A tractor comes through most days and she steps up into the verge and the man lifts two fingers off the wheel and she lifts a hand, and that is the entire transaction, and it has happened perhaps four hundred times.

She came back to God eighteen months ago. It was not gentle and it was not gradual. Something ended, and something else began, and she has no doubt at all about what happened to her in that eight week stretch, and she will tell you about it if you ask, and she cries when she does.

And then she waited to be given something.

She was ready. That is the part that is hard to say without sounding foolish. She told Him she was available for anything. She meant it, and she still means it, and she had privately understood that a person who is brought back that hard is brought back for a reason, and that the reason would arrive, and that it would look like a thing to do.

Here is what arrived. A job at the garden center, three days a week, mostly on the tills and sometimes moving stock. A neighbor two doors down with a hip that is not what it was, whose bins go out on a Wednesday because somebody has to. A cousin who rings on Sunday evenings and talks for forty minutes. A lane.

She has been reading all of it as a waiting room.

Two weeks ago a woman at church asked her, brightly, in the way people do: so what has God got you doing these days?

And she heard herself say, oh, nothing yet.

She had been up since six. She had put the bins out in the rain, walked the lane, taken a call from the cousin, and covered somebody else's shift because they had a sick child. Four things, all of them true, all of them done before nine. And she stood there with a cup in her hand and said nothing yet, and she has not been able to get that sentence out of her head since.

You know that answer. Maybe your lane is a corridor or a car park or a bus route. You know exactly what you were bought out of. You could give the date and the details, and you have, more than once. And you have never once been able to say what you were bought for, so you have been treating the whole of your actual life as the corridor outside the room where the real thing is going to be handed to you.

The most famous answer in the prophets was given to a man asking the wrong question

Everybody knows the verse. Almost nobody knows what is happening in the six lines before it, and the six lines are the whole reason it lands.

A man is standing there working out what he has to bring. He starts reasonably and then he escalates, and the escalation gets frantic and then it gets terrible, and by the end he is offering something no one should ever offer, and he is asking the whole time: what will be enough, what does He want, tell me the figure so I can be done with this.

And the answer comes back and it is not an amount at all.

He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?Micah 6:8

Look at what those three things are and what they are not. Not one of them is a post. Not one of them is a placement, an office, a region, or a thing you would put on a form. Do justly is how you handle the person in front of you. Love mercy is what you are like when somebody has got it wrong. Walk humbly with your God is a companionship, done at walking pace, daily, in a lane.

You have been given all three of those already, and none of them were being withheld until you were ready. I am not shrinking your calling to make you feel better about the garden center. Micah 6:8 lists them as what is required and lists nothing else, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an answer given to a frantic man in a prophet's argument and sets it down in a lane between two hedgerows at half past seven.

And notice the last of the three especially, because it is the one that reframes the other two. Walk humbly with your God. With. Not for. The preposition is doing the heaviest work in the sentence, and everybody reads straight over it.

You are walking with Him and not working for Him at a distance. His word puts with your God at the end of that verse deliberately, and the Spirit is the one who is called alongside, which is exactly the position the preposition describes.

Purpose is not repayment, and this is where that gets decided

Now the thing this category exists to say, and the trap it exists to close, because you have been standing very near it for eighteen months.

You were brought back. Something happened to you that you cannot explain away and would not want to. And underneath your readiness, underneath the genuine availability, there has been a quieter arithmetic running: He did that, therefore there must be something I am now for, therefore the assignment is what I owe.

That is repayment wearing the clothes of calling, and it is the single most respectable way a redeemed person ends up back under a weight.

Let me say it flatly. There is no assignment that is your side of the transaction, because there is no transaction with two sides. What He did was finished, and it did not leave a balance, and nothing you do from here is a contribution toward it. If a posting arrived tomorrow it would be a gift and not an invoice, and the fact that one has not arrived is not a comment on your worth, your readiness, or the seriousness of what happened to you.

You are not carrying a debt of purpose, and there is no work assigned to you as your share of the price. It is written that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, which puts the works on His side of the ledger as well, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that from quietly turning back into a bill.

And here is what this site says in one breath, and it belongs at the end as much as the beginning. The record stands and the verdict is changed. The eight weeks happened, and what came before them happened, and God has not tidied any of it away and neither will I. What has changed is the verdict, and one of the things the changed verdict does is settle what your ordinary Wednesday means. It is not a waiting room. It is not filler. It is the walk.

You are being handed a life rather than a job, and a life is the larger of the two. Scripture says walk humbly with your God, which describes a shape and not a position, and the same Spirit who brought you back is the one already walking that lane beside you at half past seven.