Half A Song In A Notebook

The notebook lives under a pile of other notebooks, which is a thing she did on purpose about eighteen months ago and has never admitted to herself.

Page nine. A verse, in pencil, with one line crossed out twice and rewritten the same both times. A chorus underneath it that she still thinks is good, which is the painful part, and then, beneath that, in her own handwriting, the words v2 and a colon.

That is it. v2: and then two years of nothing.

She remembers the evening. She remembers where she was sitting and what was on in the next room. She remembers that it came fast, the way the good ones apparently do, and that she went to bed sure she would finish it in the morning.

What happened in the morning was that her sister rang. And then it was a fortnight, and then it was a job change, and then there was a period she does not talk about much, and then it was simply a long time ago and picking it up would have meant explaining to herself why she had put it down.

The guitar case is in the hall cupboard behind the hoover. Not lost. Not sold. Just behind the hoover, which is somehow worse.

The sentence, when it comes, does not come in words about music. It comes like this: I get an idea from God about once a decade and I let it die on page nine.

You have a page nine. It might be a letter you started, or a thing you told someone you would do, or a small offering you meant to make and never made. It sits there, half done, and every time you catch sight of it, it says something to you about the kind of person you are.

Who put the wanting there

Before anything else, I want to ask about the beginning rather than the ending, because everybody stares at the ending.

Two years ago you wanted to write something for God. Nobody made you. There was no deadline, no audience, no reward, and that evening had been a tiring one. And out of nowhere there was a wanting, strong enough to make you sit down with a pencil at an hour you should have been asleep.

Where do you think that came from.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.Philippians 2:13

Read that slowly, because it contains something almost nobody notices. It does not say God helps you do things you have decided to do. It says He works the willing as well as the doing. The wanting is His. The urge on page nine, the thing that got you out of the chair, that was not you generating a good intention. That was God at work in you, and He was at work in you before you picked up the pencil and He has not stopped since you put it down.

You are carrying a work that God started in you and never handed over, and it did not go dormant on the night you stopped writing. That is what the written word says over you and not a kind reading I have chosen to offer, and the Holy Spirit who put the wanting there in the first place is the evidence that the work has never once depended on your finishing anything.

Now look what that does to the accounting you have been doing. If the willing was His, then a blank second verse is information about a fortnight, a job change and a hard season. It is not information about what God is doing in you, and it never had the standing to become that.

The thing He began was not the song

Here is the second thing, and this is where the whole weight comes off.

You have been reading Philippians as though the good work God began in you is the project. So an unfinished project reads as an unfinished God, or worse, as a God who began something and then found you unequal to it. But look at what He is actually working: in you, both to will and to do. The work is a person. It always was. The song was one small thing that work produced on one evening, and the work itself has been proceeding in you at full speed for two years with nothing on paper to show for it.

You have been worked on continuously through the whole of the two years you would describe as nothing, and the working never once slowed because a page stayed blank. Scripture says it is God who works in you of His good pleasure, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that working rather than waiting behind the hoover for you to get the case out.

And there is something worth saying very plainly, because this is exactly the place a message like this could turn into a nudge and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to finish the song. Not this week, not ever. If verse two never exists you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because the work of God in you was never a project with milestones and it does not get marked incomplete.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a comforting thought to file under the other notebooks. 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. Spoken. Not thought about while looking at a cupboard. And the thing in the way is not the job change and it is not your sister ringing. It is a sentence: I let it die on page nine. That sentence has been running quietly for two years because nobody has ever answered it 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 person with any authority standing in a hall. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much you meant them.

If page nine has taken you somewhere darker than frustration, and there are days 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.