There is a list. It has never been written down, which is how she knows it is serious.
Before she starts, there needs to be: a settled situation at home, which means one particular person being through the thing they are going through. Money that is not being watched weekly. A stretch of health with nothing in the diary. And the fourth one, which she has only recently admitted to herself, which is somebody saying it is a good idea in a way she believes.
Four years. And here is what happened last month, in a supermarket car park of all places: she was going through the list, the way she does, and she got to the end of it and something in her said, quite calmly, none of these are coming.
Not not yet. Not not this year. None of them. Because the person at home is going to be going through something for the foreseeable future, and money is watched weekly by everybody she knows, and a stretch of health with nothing in the diary has not existed since she was thirty-four.
She sat in the car for a while after that.
The sentence is not I have been putting it off. It is worse and it is more honest: I built a set of conditions that cannot happen, and I do not know whether that was caution or whether it was a way of never having to find out.
You know that list. It might be conditions, or a season, or a sign, or the right moment. You have been waiting for something reasonable, and somewhere recently you noticed that the thing you are waiting for is not on its way.
What the verse describes, and what it does not demand
There is a line in Ecclesiastes about farming that people turn into a productivity slogan, and it is worth reading in the flat, unbothered voice the book is actually written in.
He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.Ecclesiastes 11:4
Notice what it is not. It is not an order. There is no imperative anywhere in that sentence. Nobody is told to get out there and sow regardless.
It is a description. It says, plainly, that a man who is watching conditions is a man who will not put seed in the ground, and that a man watching the sky is not going to bring anything in. That is all. It is an observation about how waiting works, delivered by the least sentimental writer in the Bible, who has no interest in motivating anybody.
And the honesty of that is a relief, because you have been read at, gently, for four years by people quoting encouraging verses, and this one is simply telling you what you already worked out in a car park.
You are somebody God holds without conditions, and He has never once made your beginning the price of His attention. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman with an unwritten list, and the Holy Spirit who is in you at this moment is the evidence that nothing has been on hold pending the weather.
Watch what that does to the arithmetic in the car. If the verse describes rather than commands, then four years of conditions is information about a household, a bank account and a body. It is not the gatekeeper of your life, and it never had the standing to become that.
What this page is not going to say to you
Here is the second thing, and it is the reason you can keep reading.
This is where every other article on this subject tells you to start anyway. To take the leap. To do it scared. And that instruction, given to somebody in your situation, is not encouragement, it is a demand dressed as one, and it will send you back to the list within a fortnight feeling worse.
So: nothing here is telling you to begin. If that thing never gets started, nothing has been failed and nobody has been disobeyed, and this page will not be disappointed. Nothing in the next ten minutes will ask for a commitment of any kind.
And nothing here promises it would go well. Nobody knows. If you did start, it might go the way the last thing went, and pretending otherwise would make this page one more voice that has cost you something.
You have been carried through all four of those years, and the carrying was never waiting on conditions. 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 standing outside a window checking the sky along with you.
The one thing that has changed today is that you have said, in a car park, that the conditions are not coming. That is not a defeat. That is the first honest sentence in four years and it belongs to you.
This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a list you never wrote down. 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 run through in a car park. And the thing in the way is not the person at home and it is not the money. It is a sentence: I do not know whether that was caution or a way of never having to find out. 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 sitting in a parked car. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in whether you are ready.
If this has taken you somewhere darker than frustration, 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.
So. The window, or the car, or wherever the list gets run through.
Open both hands in front of you, palms up. Actually do it, empty, with nothing in them, which is the honest shape of four years of conditions.
Say out loud the conditions on the list. All four. Plain words, the flattest in the house. Say the last one too, the one about somebody believing in it, because that is the one that has never been spoken.
Then say one sentence naming who is not waiting on the weather. Not what you are going to do, because nothing here is asking you to do anything, and God has never made a person's beginning the condition of His work in them. Just who is not waiting. One sentence, then let your hands drop.
You are not a woman who has wasted four years watching the sky, you are a woman held by a God who has never once been waiting for conditions. That is the word's account of these four years rather than my comfortable version of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at work in you through every one of them.
Declare this over yourself
Speak these out loud with your hands still open. You stand in Christ, and Scripture is what makes these words a declaration rather than a wish, and the Holy Spirit carries them rather than however ready you feel today. What God does next with your life, and whether you ever begin that thing, is His to decide, and He is not asking you to start and neither is this page.
- Conditions I have been waiting for, you are not the gatekeeper of my life. Ecclesiastes says the one who watches the wind does not sow, and it says it as a description and never as an order, and you are four things that are not coming.
- Question about whether it was caution or a way of never finding out, you have no place in my mouth, and I put you out in the name of Jesus. Scripture never made my beginning the price of God's attention, so I do not have to settle that question to be held.
- Lord, You are not waiting on the weather and You never have been, and I am standing on that today with my hands open and empty. I thank You, because Your Spirit has been working in me through four years of a list I never wrote down, and I am putting my hands down free either way.
Ecclesiastes 11:4
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