Doing It Before Anybody Said Go

Beverley has been running it for nine years, and she is still waiting to be asked to run it.

Both of those are true at the same time and she has never once said the second half out loud, because saying it would sound like a complaint about people she loves and it is not one.

Here is the actual situation. Nine years ago a thing needed doing and nobody was doing it, and she started doing it, in the ordinary way that women like Beverley start doing things, which is quietly and without an announcement. It grew. It is now a real work with real people in it and there are two others helping and one of them has been helping for six years.

Nobody has ever formally handed it to her.

There was no evening where anybody stood up and said this is Beverley's and Beverley is the one who carries it. There has never been a conversation about it, and if you asked around that building the answer would be, warmly and immediately, oh, that is Beverley's, and not one of the people who said it would remember ever having decided it.

So she carries a thing she has not been given, and she does the work of somebody who was sent, and she stands, in some interior room, in a queue.

She noticed the queue on a Tuesday. She was carrying a stack of chairs, which she has carried about four hundred times, and a thought went past that she had never let arrive before.

What am I waiting for?

And then, immediately after it, in the same breath, the thing underneath it: if it came, what would actually change tomorrow?

She put the chairs down and stood there for a bit, because the honest answer was nothing. Nothing would change. The work would be exactly the same work on Wednesday morning. What she is waiting for would not add a single thing to what she does.

Which means she is waiting for something else, and she does not have a name for it.

You have your own version. There is something you are already carrying, and there is a permission you have been waiting for, and if it arrived tomorrow your actual Wednesday would be identical.

Nobody is telling you the waiting is silly. It is not, and I am not going to be clever about it.

But it is worth finding out when the calling was actually issued, because it was not issued at a meeting.

Paul dates his own calling and the date is startling

There is a clause in Galatians where Paul, arguing about his own credentials, puts a date on the whole business, and the date is much earlier than anybody would expect.

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace.Galatians 1:15

Separated me from my mother's womb.

He is not talking about the Damascus road there. That comes in the next sentence. He is saying that the setting apart predates the encounter, predates the conversion, predates every conscious moment he could point to, and predates by a very long way any room that later recognized it.

And notice why he brings it up. He is not boasting. He is in the middle of a dispute about whether his commission is second-hand, and the way he settles it is by moving the date backwards, out of reach of every human process entirely.

And your calling was not issued at a meeting. That is not my encouragement: the written word puts the separating before birth in the case it uses as its worked example, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman standing in a hall with a stack of chairs in her arms.

And nothing you are waiting for would add to it. The word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, which means they are not provisional, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which is exactly why nothing would change on Wednesday morning if the sentence you are waiting for was finally said.

What she is actually waiting for

Now let me be careful, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does damage.

The cheap version says: you do not need anybody, stop waiting, walk in your authority. And a certain kind of reader takes that and goes off alone and gets hurt, and hurts other people on the way, and I am not going to be responsible for another one of those.

Beverley is not waiting for permission to do the work. She has been doing the work for nine years and nobody has stopped her and nobody would.

She is waiting to be seen.

That is the actual thing, and it is not a small or unworthy thing to want. Being recognized out loud by the people you serve alongside is one of the good gifts. It is in the Bible: those men laid hands on Barnabas and Saul, and Paul later reported back to that same church, and the whole business is described without embarrassment.

So the absence is real. I am not going to talk you out of it, and I am not going to tell you it does not matter, because it does.

But you are already seen. Not once somebody says it: the word calls Him the God who sees, and says that not one cup of cold water goes unnoticed, and the Spirit is the one who makes a person feel noticed rather than merely informed that she is, which is the difference between a doctrine and a comfort.

And your carrying has been counted. The word says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and not unrighteous to forget is a strange and lovely construction: it puts remembering on the side of His justice rather than His kindness, and the Spirit is the one who makes that land in somebody who has never been thanked properly.

Nobody here is telling you to appoint yourself

I want that said plainly, because this site would rather be silent than produce another self-appointed person.

Do not stand up and announce anything. Do not go to anybody and ask to be recognized, which almost never produces what a person actually wants and quite often produces something worse. And do not, on the strength of a message you read on a Tuesday, decide that the people around you have failed you, because I do not know them and you have to live with them and they are almost certainly not withholding anything on purpose.

Nine years of nobody saying it is much more likely to be nine years of everybody assuming it was obvious.

And you are not required to be recognized to be sent. Nothing in Scripture makes a human sentence the condition of a divine one, and the Spirit of God has never once waited for a room to catch up before working through somebody.