I Am Waiting For Peace About It

The phrase she has used for eight years, to herself and twice to other people, is that she does not have peace about it.

She means it honestly. It is not a way of saying no politely. There is a thing she has considered on and off for the whole of that time, and every time she gets close to acting on it there is a specific unsettledness in her, and she has always read that as the answer.

She is not a woman who reaches for spiritual language carelessly. She has thought hard about how a person knows anything and she is suspicious of people who are too certain.

Which is exactly why the thing she noticed six weeks ago has been sitting in her ever since.

She noticed it in a chapel, on an ordinary morning, standing near the door while people talked. And what she noticed was this: she has never had peace about anything.

Not this. Not the job she took at thirty-one, which turned out well. Not the move. Not the two decisions she is gladdest about in her entire life. Every one of them was made with exactly the same unsettledness in her chest that she has been reading, for eight years, as a no.

She has been waiting for a state she has never experienced about anything, and treating its absence as a message.

What is not going to happen

Let me say it plainly, because you will read this carefully and you should.

Nothing here is going to tell you what to do about the thing. This page does not know what it is and cannot see your life and has no business steering it.

And nothing here is going to tell you that eight years of waiting was disobedience. It was not. You have been trying not to be one of those people who is too certain, and that instinct is a good one and I share it.

And nothing here is going to hand you a plan or a direction or anything reaching past this week.

You are not being steered and you are not being scolded. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a verse everybody knows, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to feel settled before He would deal with her.

Lean not unto thine own understanding

Here is the sentence, and the second half is the one that has been aimed at you the whole time.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.Proverbs 3:5

Lean not unto thine own understanding.

That verse is normally used against people who are too confident, who have worked it all out and are proceeding on their own analysis. And that is a legitimate reading and it is probably the primary one.

But look at the word lean. It means to put your weight on something. To rest the outcome on it.

And ask honestly what you have been resting the outcome on for eight years.

Not analysis. You have not been over-confident. You have been resting it on your own inner weather. On whether a thing feels settled in you. Which is a reading of your own interior, produced by your own understanding of yourself, and it is exactly as much your own as a spreadsheet would be.

You have been leaning your whole weight on your own inner state, and that is the second half of that verse aimed precisely at you rather than at the confident people it is usually used against. I am not stretching that. Proverbs 3:5 says lean not unto thine own, and an inner reading is unavoidably one's own, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman standing near a chapel door.

Peace in Scripture is not a compass

Now the plain thing, and I want to be careful because peace is real and I am not dismissing it.

Peace appears constantly in Scripture. It is a fruit of the Spirit, it is left with the disciples, it passes understanding, it guards hearts and minds. All of that is true and none of it is being taken away here.

What it is never used as is a guidance instrument.

Nobody in Scripture decides anything by checking whether they have peace about it. Paul is in Troas with a door opened to him and he says he had no rest in his spirit, and he goes to Macedonia, and the going is not decided by the rest. Jesus in Gethsemane is in an agony and prays that the cup would pass, and then goes.

Peace is a gift and a fruit. It is not a compass, and Scripture never uses it as one.

You have been using something real as an instrument it was never given as, and the word treats peace as a fruit rather than as a signal. That is how it appears throughout, and the Spirit who searches all things has been with you through eight years of honest waiting and has not been withholding a signal.

And what is actually being asked

Here is the exact thing, and it is smaller than you are expecting.

Not the thing you have been considering for eight years. This page does not know it and is not asking about it.

One thing in front of you this week. Ordinary. Already there. Requiring no settled feeling and no resolution of anything.

And you will probably feel unsettled while you do it, because you feel unsettled about everything, including the two decisions you are gladdest about.

That is not a message. That is what your inside is like, and it has been like that during the good decisions too.

You are able to do one ordinary thing this week while feeling exactly as unsettled as you always do. Scripture never once requires an inner state before a person may do the next obvious thing, and the Spirit who was given to guide is not waiting at the far end of a feeling you have never had about anything.