Eleven Years Waiting For A Call

He has a folder.

Not metaphorically. An actual folder, in a drawer in the room he calls a study and his wife calls the small room, and in it there are notes he made at three different points across eleven years about things he thought might be it.

The first one is from a conference where a man said something that went through him like a current, and he wrote four pages that night and read them the next morning and could not work out what they were asking him to do.

The second is from a period about six years ago when he was reading a great deal and something kept surfacing, and he made a list, and the list is good, and nothing happened.

The third is a single line on a card from about eighteen months back and he is not going to tell anybody what it says.

Eleven years.

And in those eleven years, in terms of anything he could point at, he has done essentially nothing.

That is not laziness and it would be unjust to describe it that way. He has been at that church every week. He helps. He is one of the men everybody is glad to see.

But the thing itself, whatever the thing is, has not started, because he has been waiting for something definite enough to act on, and he has been genuinely afraid that starting without it would be getting ahead of God, which is a phrase he heard once in his twenties and which has been sitting in him ever since.

What is not going to happen here

Let me say it now, so you can read the rest without bracing.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you what you are for. There is no list at the bottom, no exercise, no description of you close enough to take as a diagnosis. That is not what this site does and it is not going to start now.

And nothing here is going to tell you that the eleven years were disobedience. They were not. You were waiting because you were afraid of getting ahead of God, and that fear comes from a real reverence, and I am not going to trample it.

And nothing here is going to hand you a plan, a calling, or anything that extends past this week.

You are not being scolded for eleven years and you are not being handed a program. That is not caution on my part. Scripture is what handles this, in the first thing God ever said to Abram, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to know the destination before He would move him.

Read what Abram was actually told

Here is the sentence, and count the information in it.

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee.Genesis 12:1

Unto a land that I will shew thee.

Not a named land. Not a described one. Not one he could have found on any map available to him.

The future tense in that clause is doing enormous work: I will shew thee. Which means at the moment of the instruction, the destination had not been given, and the whole content of the guidance was a direction to leave and a promise that showing would happen later.

Abram went out not knowing whither he went. Hebrews says that about him explicitly, as a compliment.

You have been waiting for a category of information that the first man in this story was never given before he moved. I am not stretching that. Genesis 12:1 has the showing in the future tense and the going in the imperative, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man with a folder in a drawer.

The showing happens on the road

Now the thing that follows from it, and it is the part that changes eleven years.

If the showing comes after the going, then it is not available before it.

Which means the definite thing you have been waiting for, the one that would make it safe to start, may not be a thing that exists in a stationary man's life at all. Not because God is withholding it. Because that is the order the showing happens in.

You have been standing still waiting for a category of information that arrives while moving.

And I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where a page like this usually goes wrong. I am not telling you that if you start doing things, clarity will come. That is a promise about outcomes and I am not authorized to make it and nobody else is either.

What Scripture shows is the order. Get thee out, and then I will shew thee. The going came first for Abram and it is written down that way.

You have not been failing to find something, you have been standing in the one posture the showing does not usually arrive in. That is Genesis 12:1 in its own sequence, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that small room with the folder for eleven years and has not once been withholding.

And the step is genuinely small

Here is where I want to be exact, because a man who has waited eleven years hears the word start and thinks it means something enormous.

It does not mean that.

You are not being asked for the thing in the folder. You are not being asked for a direction, a decision, a commitment, or an answer to the question that has been running since your twenties.

One thing that is in front of you this week. Something that is already there, that you can see, that does not require you to know anything about the eleven years at all.

Not because small steps lead to big ones. That is another promise about outcomes and I am not making it either.

Because that is the only thing anybody is ever actually given, and Abram was given a direction and a week is a direction.

You are able to take one ordinary thing this week without deciding anything at all about the eleven years. Scripture never once requires a person to resolve the whole question before they may do the next thing, and the Spirit who was given to guide is not standing at the end of a plan waiting for you to produce one.