As Far As The Lamp Reaches

There is a trestle table by the door with three clipboards on it, and a biro on a string that does not work, and a spare biro that does.

Kath has been standing about four feet from that table for eleven minutes. Not queuing. Adjacent. She has said hello to five people in that time and turned down two offers of coffee, and every so often she drifts one step nearer and reads the top of the first sheet again as though she has not already read it twice.

Somebody's toddler is being chased past her knees. There is a very good smell of instant coffee and slightly burnt toast from the kitchen hatch. Sunday, ordinary, everybody talking.

And Kath cannot put her name on a line.

Eleven years. That is how long she has been waiting to find out what she is for. She has read the books. She has listened, honestly and hopefully, to a lot of people who were sure. She has prayed the sensible prayer a thousand times: show me, and I will do it, whatever it is. And the answer has never come in the shape she was watching for, and in the meantime she has done, by her own reckoning, nothing.

So the biro is the problem. Because putting her name on one of those three lines feels like answering a question she has never been able to answer. What if it is not the right one. What if choosing something is the same as giving up on being told. What if moving before the clarity comes is running out in front of God.

If that is you, standing four feet from something with a working pen in your hand, this one is for you.

How Far A Lamp Actually Reaches

Let me start with the years, because they are the tender part and I am not going to skate over them.

The waiting was not disobedience. Nobody was cross with you. You were not failing a test you did not know you were sitting, and the eleven years were not eleven years of God tapping His fingers. A person who has been asking God to show them is a person who has been talking to God every day for eleven years, and that is not nothing. It has never once been nothing, and the Spirit of God was present in every one of those prayers, listening rather than tallying.

What has happened is smaller and more fixable than a fault. You were given a picture of guidance that does not appear anywhere in Scripture: the idea that you get the map first, all of it, and then you set off. And because that has never arrived, you concluded that the road was closed. It was not closed. You were waiting at the door of it for a document that was never going to be issued.

Look at the picture God actually uses.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.Psalm 119:105

Think about how much light that is. Not a floodlight over the whole valley. Not a map on a table with the route marked in a color. A lamp at the feet, which in that world was a small clay dish of oil with a wick in it, carried low, and the reach of it was about a stride.

That is the design. It is not a shortage. A lamp carried at the feet gives you exactly what you need to put one foot down safely, and then the light moves, because you did. The next stretch of road becomes visible for one reason only: you walked into the last one.

Take this now, in the middle of a busy hall, because it is the thing that gets you off the spot you have been standing on. You have light already, not the whole route, which you were never promised, but genuine light at your feet. Scripture never once offers the route, and the light at the feet is held there held there by the Spirit of God who is not withholding a document and has never been unwilling to lead you.

And I want to be careful with the next sentence, because it is where sites like this one usually go wrong.

Doing the next thing is not how you find out what you are for. I am not handing you a method. Nobody discovers their purpose by volunteering more, and if that were the mechanism the whole thing would be a treasure hunt with God as the one hiding. It is not a treasure hunt. God is the one who places people, deliberately, and 1 Corinthians 12 says He arranged the members as He chose and that His Spirit gives out what He gives out as He wills. He is not waiting for you to guess correctly before He does it.

What the next thing actually is, is the next thing. That is the whole of it. One ordinary act of love in front of you this week, done because it is in front of you and because a person needs it, and not as an application form for anything.

Which takes all the weight off it, and that is the point. The reason you cannot sign the sheet is that you have made a clipboard carry your entire life. Nothing on that table is that. Somebody needs a lift on Thursday. Somebody needs the chairs put out. That is not a calling and it is not an answer, and it does not have to be, and you can do it without it meaning anything at all about your future.

And here is the part I most want you to have. You are not running ahead of God when you take the step that is lit. That fear has cost you more than the eleven years did. The word says the lamp is at the feet, which means the lit ground is not a temptation to be resisted, it is provision, and His Spirit does not lead a person by leaving them frozen four feet from a table.

None of this is a plan. I am not asking you for a season, a commitment, a schedule or a direction. One week. Nothing decided beyond Sunday.