Eleven Years Since You Stepped Out

You were thirty-four and you knew.

That is the part nobody argues with, including you. It was not a mood and it was not burnout and it was not a bad quarter. You knew, the way a person knows a thing once and then cannot unknow it, that you were not to stay in that work.

You handed the notice in on a Tuesday in September and you have never had one hour of doubt about the leaving itself.

Eleven years.

You have worked since. You have provided. You have done things that were good and useful and you have raised two children and you have been, by any reasonable account, a faithful man.

And in eleven years, not one person has ever said a sentence to you about what it was for.

They said well done at the time. Two people said they admired it. Somebody at the church said God honors obedience, warmly, and then talked about something else, and you have thought about that sentence more than they will ever know, because it was true and it was also the last word anybody said on the subject.

So you have a decision that stands. You have never regretted it. And you have a large, quiet, eleven-year-shaped space where the answer to the second half of the question was supposed to go.

And lately, at forty-five, you have started to wonder whether the second half was the point at all, or whether obedience is just a series of doors closing behind a person, and you would not say that out loud to anybody in your congregation, and that is why you are reading this.

Paul introduces himself with a preposition

There is a self-description at the top of the longest letter in the New Testament, and the whole weight of it sits on a word most people read straight past.

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God.Romans 1:1

Separated unto.

Not separated from. He does not open the letter by listing what he had left, and he had left an enormous amount: a career, a party, a reputation, a whole life that was going somewhere. Not one word of it appears in the sentence.

The preposition is unto, and everything after it is a destination.

Now put that next to eleven years. You were not merely taken out of something. The written word does not describe a set-apart person by their subtractions, and the Holy Spirit who moved you in September was not conducting a demolition, and there is a direction in this that nobody has ever named for you because most people only ever learn to talk about the leaving.

That is not their fault. Leaving is visible and destinations are not. But it has left you carrying half a sentence for a decade.

The eleven years were not a waiting room

Now here is the thing I most want to hand you, and I have to be careful with it, because it can be said in a way that would make the last decade sound like a failure.

You have been assuming the answer has not arrived. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

I do not think that is what has happened. I think the answer has been arriving continuously for eleven years in a form you did not recognize, because you were watching for a role and what you have been given is a shape.

Ask the people around you what you are for. Not what you do. What you are for. I would put money on the answers being remarkably consistent and on you never having heard any of them, because nobody says that kind of thing to a man's face unprompted.

You are set apart unto something and it has been running the whole time. That is what is written over a separated person and the Holy Spirit has been doing the setting apart in the ordinary years, and eleven years of no announcement is not eleven years of no purpose.

I am not going to tell you what the destination is. I do not know, and a man who tells you he does from a page is selling something. But I will say the thing nobody has said in eleven years, which is that there is one, and that it is not the absence of the old work, and that the sentence has a second half.

The plain hall and what was preached in it

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and among the things preached in that plain room was the doctrine of being set apart wholly to God.

It has often been taught since as a list of things a person does not do, and taught that way it does exactly what has been done to you: it hands somebody a subtraction and calls it a gift.

That was never the shape of it in that hall. The room existed to send people out to the streets around it. The whole point of the doctrine there was direction, and there were people in that hall who had given up a great deal and every one of them was told, plainly, what they had been freed toward, because the hall had work for them by Tuesday.

You have been given the leaving without the sending, and that is not a failure in you.

The written word says separated unto, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the separating, and He has never once done it merely to make a space.