The One That Outlived Your Interest

Rae started six things over about thirty years and one of them is still running, and she has not been interested in it since about the ninth year.

She would want that put carefully, because it sounds worse than it is. She has not been bored by the people. She loves the people. What went, somewhere around year nine, was the thing she cannot really name: the lift she used to feel driving there, the sense of it being hers, the slight private thrill of having made a thing that was working.

That went, and it has not come back, and the thing is in its twenty-sixth year.

Meanwhile the other five are gone. Not badly. Two of them ended properly and well and she would do them again. One handed over to somebody else and is thriving in a form she would not have chosen. Two simply stopped, the way things stop, when the person carrying them stops carrying them.

And she was standing at her own sink last spring when the thought landed, and it landed sideways, the way the true ones do.

The one I stopped enjoying is the one that is still here.

She stood with her hands in the water for a while.

Because that is not what any of us are told. We are told to follow the thing that makes you come alive. Find where your joy is. If the fire has gone out, that is your answer, move on. And Rae has heard versions of that from good people her whole adult life and has never quite been able to say what was wrong with it.

Here is what is wrong with it. It describes an appetite very well, and it describes a sending not at all.

You have your own version of this. There is something in your life that has outlasted your own enthusiasm for it. You may have been quietly ashamed of that, and reading books that told you the shine going was a signal, and wondering whether you have been disobedient for twenty-six years.

Nobody here is going to tell you that. Something has survived you, and that is worth looking at properly.

The sentence at the end of the journey

There is a small line at the end of the first missionary journey that most people read past on the way to the next chapter.

And thence sailed to Antioch, from whence they had been recommended to the grace of God for the work which they fulfilled.Acts 14:26

Look at the bookends of that sentence. They set out having been recommended to the grace of God, which is the older word for commended, handed over, entrusted. And they come back to the same place having fulfilled the work.

Nothing in between is described as enjoyable. Read the chapter before it. They were run out of one town, and in the next one he was stoned and left for dead outside the walls and got up and walked back into the city.

And the summary sentence for the whole business is not and it was wonderful. It is: the work which they fulfilled.

Fulfilled is a completion word. It is what you say about a thing that was given and then finished, and it has nothing whatsoever to say about how the person felt at any point along the way.

And your endurance is not evidence against you. That is not my reassurance: the written word summarizes an apostolic journey by completion rather than by enjoyment, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman standing at a sink with her hands in the water.

And the going of the shine did not mean you had missed something. The word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, which is to say He does not take them back and does not revise them, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which is why the thing kept running through seventeen years of you not feeling much about it.

What survival is actually reporting

Now let me say what I am not saying, because this is where a message like this does harm.

I am not telling you that joy is suspect or that a thing you love is therefore not from God. That would be a miserable doctrine and it is not in the text. Paul is plainly delighted in half his letters. Delight is not a warning sign.

And I am not telling you to stay in something that is finished. Some things end and ending them well is obedience, and two of Rae's six ended well and she would do them again. A thing ending is not a failure and I am not going to make you feel one.

What I am saying is narrower.

Enthusiasm is a genuine gift and it is a terrible instrument. It measures your own state very accurately and it measures the assignment not at all. It goes up and down with sleep and with weather and with whether the last conversation went well. If you steer by it you will steer by a needle that is responding to something other than north.

Survival is a slower instrument and a better one. Not because staying is holier than leaving, but because a thing that has outlasted your own appetite for it is a thing that has been running on something other than your appetite.

And it is worth asking what.

And you have not been carrying it alone. The word says He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the performing is His verb rather than yours, and the Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to look at twenty-six years and see somebody else's hand in it rather than only her own tiredness.

And you are not required to feel it to be in it. Nothing in Scripture makes an assignment depend on a person's enthusiasm for it, and the Spirit of God has never once measured a servant by how the driving there felt.

The other question, and it is the kinder one

There is a second thing survival reports and it is the one Rae actually needed.

If the thing has run for twenty-six years, then somewhere in there it stopped being about her.

That is not an insult. It is the point. A thing that is still hers is a thing she is still carrying. A thing that is in its twenty-sixth year has other people in it who do not experience it as Rae's project at all, and several of them would be genuinely surprised to hear it described that way.

Which means the lift going was not the calling leaving. It was the thing growing past the person who started it, which is what a started thing is supposed to do, and it feels almost exactly like losing interest from the inside.