He Carries What You Begin

The corridor outside the meeting room at the library has a noticeboard with four pins and one notice, and Colin has now read the notice twice.

Through the door he can hear the chairs going into a ring. That particular scrape. Somebody laughing at something, a bag being put down, the kettle in the corner going on for the paper cups nobody enjoys.

He was in that room three years ago. Same course, same evening, same ring of chairs. He got to week four and then the shifts changed at the depot and Tuesdays were gone, and that was the end of it, and nobody was to blame and nothing dramatic happened. It simply stopped, the way things do.

The confirmation slip is folded in his coat pocket and has been since Thursday. He has taken it out on the bus twice. And what is keeping him in this corridor is not that he thinks the course is beyond him. He could do the course.

It is that he does not think he could stand in this corridor a third time.

And you are in a corridor of your own tonight.

Yours has a different door on it. A phone with a number in it you have not rung. A form. A room with people in it who would be glad to see you. And you are not standing out here because you are lazy, and you are not standing out here because you have not been told to be brave. You are standing out here because you already know what it is like to watch a thing you cared about quietly stop, and you have decided, somewhere you would not say out loud, that you are the sort of thing that stops.

The man who wrote about mornings had watched a city burn

The line I want to put in your hands tonight was not written by somebody having a good year.

Jeremiah wrote Lamentations sitting in the wreckage of everything he had spent his life warning people about. The city was gone. He had been right, which is the coldest possible comfort, and he was not writing an encouragement. Read the chapter before this line and it is unrelenting. He calls himself a man who has seen affliction. He says his soul is bowed down within him.

And then, in the middle of it, he does something that has held up for two and a half thousand years. He says: this I call to mind, therefore I have hope.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22, 23

New every morning. Not renewed on merit. Not issued in a set quantity at birth and drawn down each time you use one. You have not spent your allocation of beginnings, because there is no allocation and there never was. That is the written word and not my optimism about your situation, and it is His Spirit who makes a sentence from a burned city land in a corridor in a library.

What keeps going in you was never your momentum

Here is the thing I most want said, and I want it said before anything else gets built on top of it.

Nothing about you is unstoppable. You know that already, better than most people, and you have the corridor to prove it. What cannot be stopped is God's own purpose, and the only reason any of this is worth your evening is that He has put you inside it. The momentum is His. It has always been His. On your best years you were being carried and simply had enough energy to mistake it for walking.

You are held inside something you did not start and cannot break. His word says He works all things according to the counsel of His own will, and the Spirit who was given to you is the deposit on it, which means the continuation of this does not sit on your shoulders and never did.

So I am not going to ask you for determination. I have nothing to say to you about pushing on. If a person could be talked into finishing, the world would be full of finished things.

I am not promising you a different ending

Let me be honest with you in the way I would want somebody to be honest with me.

I do not know whether this second attempt runs its course. Nobody does. I will not tell you the depot will not change your shifts again, or that your health holds, or that the people who need you will need you less this year. Anyone who promises that is selling something, and it is not mine to sell.

What I can put weight on is this. You were given a place in a purpose that is God's, and a stopped thing has never once removed you from it. That is written down, and it is His Spirit who keeps you there rather than your attendance record. Many of the people in Scripture were stopped repeatedly, by prisons, by weather, by other people's decisions, by their own bodies, and not one of them is described as having fallen out of God's intention because a thing they started did not finish.