What Did Not Stop When You Did

The lanyard has a clip on it that does not work properly, and she spends the first four minutes of the open evening fixing it to her cardigan, because fixing it means looking down.

She is only here because her niece asked her. That is genuinely the reason. Seventeen, full of it, comparing the laminated timetable against the leaflet and going that one, and that one, and can I do both, and it is lovely, and she means every bit of the loveliness she is giving back.

She has sat in this room before. Twice. Second row from the back both times, same slideshow, probably the same slide about the placement partnerships, and a woman at the front saying the words we look forward to welcoming you in the same warm way. The first time, the placement fell through in the September, for reasons that were about the trust and not about her. The second time it was her own body, and there was no arguing with it.

Now she is holding a leaflet she does not want, in a room she knows the acoustics of, watching somebody she loves start the thing she twice did not start. And what is actually in her chest is not envy, because she would give that girl the world. It is a very quiet sentence that has been sitting in her for four years, and the sentence is: the common factor is me.

You have that sentence too. You did the arithmetic and you came out at the bottom of it, and nobody said it to you, and it would not matter if they did, because you have said it to yourself in your own voice, which is the only voice you actually believe.

Two different things have been stopping in the same sentence

Before anything else, let me put a knife between two words that have been glued together in you for four years, because until they come apart nothing else in this will land.

Your plan stopped. That is true and it is not in dispute. Twice, in your case, and once for reasons somebody else made and once for reasons your body made, and neither of those is a moral fact about you.

The purpose of God did not stop, and it is not the same thing as your plan. This is the whole of what this is about and I am not going to bury it in the middle. What cannot be stopped is His purpose. Not your momentum, not your capacity, not your determination, and not your track record. His.

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand.Proverbs 19:21

Read what that verse is actually doing, because it is kinder than it first looks. It is not sneering at the plans. It does not say the plans were foolish, or presumptuous, or a lesson. It simply says the plans are many, and the purpose is one, and the one is the one that stands. A person can have a great many plans in a lifetime, and be right to have made them, and watch most of them go nowhere, and still be inside a purpose that has never once slowed down.

You are inside a purpose of God right now, in a bright room with a leaflet you do not want, and it did not lose a single day of momentum during the four years you were stopped. That is Scripture's claim and not my encouragement, and the Holy Spirit who has been at work in you throughout is the evidence that the work never went on hold.

Notice what that does to the arithmetic. If the thing that keeps moving is His, then the fact that you stopped is not a data point about your worth. It is a data point about your circumstances, which is a completely different kind of information, and it was never yours to be ashamed of.

The momentum was never yours to supply

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that lifts a weight rather than adding one.

You have quietly believed that a purpose of God is a thing you carry, and that when you go down it goes down with you, like a load somebody dropped. So every stop has felt like a breakage you caused. But God is not carrying His purpose on your back. You are inside it. There is a difference between being the engine and being in the vehicle, and a person who thinks they are the engine will read every stop as an engine failure.

You have been carried the entire time, including in the years you would describe as wasted, and the carrying did not pause when you did. The written word says He works all things according to the counsel of His will, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that work in you rather than waiting for you to resume.

There is one more thing worth saying plainly, because it is the place this site could go wrong and will not. Nothing in this is asking you to attempt anything again. Not tonight, not in September, not ever. If you never fill in another form for the rest of your life you will not have stepped outside the purpose of God by one inch, because getting inside it was never something you did and staying inside it is not something you maintain. That is the difference between being loved and being employed, and you have been quietly working the second one.

And this is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a comforting idea. 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. Said, not thought. And the thing in the way is not the college, and it is not your health, and it is certainly not your niece. The thing in the way is a sentence: the common factor is me. That sentence has been running your inner life unopposed for four years because nobody has ever answered it out loud, including you.

You have real authority to answer it, and that authority comes to you because you are in Christ rather than because you are feeling strong tonight. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words; the power was never in how much you meant them.

And if the stopping has taken you somewhere darker than discouragement, 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. It is often exactly what He is doing, arriving through a phone.