The Plant and the Mug

The plant is the problem. The mug goes in a bag, the lanyard goes in a drawer, the four ring binders go in the recycling, and none of that takes any thinking. But the spider plant has been on the corner of that desk for four years and it is now sitting in the crook of her arm at ten past five, and there is soil on her sleeve, and she cannot work out how to carry it and the bag and push the door at the same time.

That is what she is thinking about. Not the meeting. The door.

The meeting was at eleven and it was kind, which somehow made it worse. Words like alignment, and streamlined, and the phrase absorbed into the wider team, said by a man who had genuinely read her reports and genuinely meant the thank you. Nobody did anything wrong. That is the part she keeps circling. There is no villain in this, no moment where somebody was cruel, nothing she can hold up and say there, that is where it went. A small good thing she started in a spare room with two other people and grew for four years has been folded into a department where it will become a line item, and she has been thanked, and the plant is in her arm.

She walks down the corridor with the carpet tiles she knows the pattern of. Past the print room. Past the noticeboard with the fire drill notice from March. And the sentence that arrives is not I am sad, because sad would be easier. The sentence is: so what was any of that for.

You have walked a corridor like it. Maybe not with a plant. Maybe out of a hall, or a hospital, or a rented room with the key posted back through the letterbox. The specifics move around and the sentence does not, because the sentence is not really about the thing that stopped. It is about you, and it has been quietly asking you for months whether anything you begin ever amounts to anything.

Two things stopped in that meeting and only one of them was real

Let me separate two words that got glued together at eleven o'clock this morning, because until they come apart nothing else here can land.

The project stopped. That is a fact and I am not going to soften it, or tell you it secretly did not stop, or hand you the line about doors and windows. It ran, it was good, it is over, and the grief is proportionate.

The purpose of God did not stop, and it was never the same object as the project. This is the whole of what I have to say and I am putting it at the front rather than saving it for the end. What cannot be stopped is His purpose. Not your output, not your capacity, not the department structure, not the four years.

I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.Job 42:2

Job says that at the end of the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody in the Bible, and notice what he does not say. He does not say his losses were secretly fine. He does not say he understands now. He says one thing only: nothing God intends can be blocked. That is a much smaller claim than the one people usually make out of it, and it is far more useful, because it holds on a Tuesday at ten past five with soil on your sleeve.

You are inside a purpose of God right now, in a corridor with a plant in your arm, and it did not lose one hour of momentum in the meeting this morning. That is what the written word says about you and not my encouragement over you, and the Holy Spirit who has been at work in you for four years is the evidence that the work was never suspended pending a decision by anybody's leadership team.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you have been running. If the thing that keeps moving is His, then a project closing is information about a department. It is not information about your worth, and it never was.

Nobody made you the engine

Here is the second thing, and it takes weight off rather than adding any.

Somewhere along the way you started believing a purpose of God is a load you carry, so that when you go down it goes down with you, like a box dropped on a stairwell. Every stop then reads as a breakage you caused. But you were never underneath it holding it up. You are inside it. There is a difference between being the engine and being a passenger, and a person who thinks she is the engine reads every stop as engine failure and starts inspecting herself for the fault.

You have been carried this whole time, and the carrying did not pause on the days you produced nothing anybody could measure. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that working in you rather than waiting on your calendar to clear.

There is something else worth saying plainly, because it is the exact place this could go wrong and will not. Nothing in this is asking you to start something else. Not next month, not ever. If you never build another thing for the rest of your life you have not stepped one inch outside the purpose of God, because getting inside it was never something you achieved and staying inside it is not something you maintain. That is the difference between being loved and being employed, and a lot of us have quietly been working the second arrangement.

And this is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a comforting thought to put in a drawer. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing standing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not thought about in a corridor. And the thing in the way is not the department, and it is not the man who chaired the meeting. It is a sentence: so what was any of that for. That sentence has been running your inner life without opposition because nobody has ever answered it out loud, including you.

You have real authority to answer it, and that authority is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel strong walking to the car park. The word gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words; the power was never in how much conviction you could manufacture on the way out of a building.

If the stopping has taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, please 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 through a phone.