Filled In And Not Sent

It is finished. That is the thing that makes this particular kind of stuck so uncomfortable.

Every box. The two references, chased and received. The paragraph at the end that she rewrote four times and that is now, she genuinely thinks, quite good.

It has been in her drafts for eleven weeks.

She opens it about once a fortnight, usually late, and reads it through, and finds nothing wrong with it, and closes it. There is no editing happening. The document has not changed in eleven weeks and neither has she.

The last time she sent one of these it went a long way. Far enough that she told people. Far enough that there was a date in a diary and a conversation about what would happen at home if it worked out, and then a phone call on a Thursday afternoon that lasted ninety seconds and was perfectly kind.

That was two years ago and she is not being dramatic when she says it took most of a year to get over. She is describing it accurately.

So the form sits there, finished, in a folder.

The sentence is not I might not get it. She knows she might not get it. It is: I cannot afford to want something that much again.

You know that drafts folder. It might be a form, or a message, or a conversation you have written out and not had. The thing is ready. You are the one who is not, and the not being ready is not laziness, it is the memory of what the last one cost.

Where the securing actually happens

There is a proverb that gets used to tell people God has a plan for their career, and it is not doing that at all, and what it is actually doing is far more useful to somebody with a full drafts folder.

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.Proverbs 16:9

Two halves and they are not in competition. A man devises. That is allowed, and it is not criticized anywhere in the verse. People plan, and the planning is a human and reasonable thing.

And the Lord directs the steps. Not: the Lord approves the plan. Not: the Lord makes the plan work. The word is about the actual walking, step by step, which happens in a way nobody can see in advance and which is not the same as the devising.

Which means the outcome of that form was never the thing you were responsible for securing, and it never was.

You are somebody whose steps God directs, and He has never once made the securing of a result your work. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman with an unsent draft, and the Holy Spirit who has been with you through the whole two years since the phone call is the evidence that the walking is being directed regardless of what is in your outbox.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic at eleven weeks. If the steps are directed, then a finished form in a folder is information about a Thursday afternoon two years ago and what it took out of you. It is not the thing you have to secure, and it never had the standing to become that.

What this page will not ask of you

Here is the second thing, and it is the whole posture of this page.

Nothing here is telling you to send it. Not today, not this week, not at all. If that form sits in the drafts until the closing date passes and then gets deleted in a tidy up, nothing has been failed at and nobody has been disobeyed.

And nothing here will tell you that if you send it, this one goes differently. Nobody knows that. That is precisely the promise that was floating around you the last time, made by well meaning people who had no information, and it is part of why the ninety second phone call cost what it did.

You have been carried through every week of the two years, including the year it took, and the carrying was never attached to an outcome. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in you rather than waiting to see whether you press send.

What is actually on offer here is smaller and it is not a push. It is that wanting something is not a debt you take on, and that the size of the last disappointment is not a debt either, and that whatever you do with that folder, the steps are being directed by somebody who has not been idle for two years.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and an open laptop. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not read through once a fortnight late at night. And the thing in the way is not the form and it is not the people on the other end. It is a sentence: I cannot afford to want something that much again. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority in front of a drafts folder. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in whether you are brave enough to send anything.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than caution, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.