Nothing Fell Out of His Hands

The storage place has a barrier that lifts if you type in the right four numbers, a corridor of orange doors, and a trolley with one wheel that fights you the whole way. Two other tenants are working the same corridor this morning, one of them whistling, and there is a kettle in the site office that anybody is allowed to use.

Unit 114 holds eleven years. Crates of board games with the boxes taped at the corners. A badminton net. Two urns. Four bin bags of coats collected for children who grew out of them before anyone came. And a shoebox of registers, the paper kind, with the names of every child who came through the doors of a Saturday club in a building that has since been sold.

Her brother in law carries out the heavy things and says nothing, which is the kindest thing he could possibly do. She keeps the shoebox on her knees in the van. She is not crying. She is doing something worse than crying, which is arithmetic: eleven years, thirty eight Saturdays a year, and it stopped, and nothing came of it, and she is fifty one.

Perhaps you have your own unit 114. A ministry that ended in a way nobody talks about. A marriage you worked at for nine years with both hands. A business, a course, a decade of caring that finished when the person died. And underneath the practical sadness there is a sentence that has been quietly hardening in you: those years are gone. Sit down on the ramp of the van with me for a minute, because there is somebody who does not agree with your sum, and He was there for every one of those Saturdays.

He keeps what stopped

Let me start by not arguing with you. The Holy Spirit has never needed me to talk anybody out of what they already know.

You are not exaggerating. The thing did stop, and it did not do what you hoped, and there is no version of this where I tell you that it secretly worked out. I will not explain your years to you either. I do not know what God was doing in them, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing out loud with your life. What I have is something better than an explanation, and it is this: the Bible has a verse where a servant of God says your sentence, word for word, and God does not correct him.

But I said, "I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity." Yet surely my right is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God.Isaiah 49:4

Read what is not there. No rebuke. No lecture about attitude. He says the hard half out loud, and then, without taking it back, he puts the whole account in a different pair of hands.

So take this as settled, and take it now. You are not holding your own years. Your labor, the stopped part, the part that embarrasses you, is with God, and it has been with Him the whole time. I am not making that up to comfort you. It is written in Isaiah 49, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a servant's complaint from the Old Testament and lays it gently across a woman with a shoebox on her knees.

And there is a habit of God underneath that verse which is worth seeing plainly.

He had just fed thousands of people out of a boy's lunch, He had done the impossible in front of everybody, and the very next instruction out of His mouth was about the bits left over. Gather up the leftover pieces, so that nothing is lost. John 6:12. The God who can conjure a meal out of nothing is fussy about scraps. That is not thrift. That is character. He does not do disposal.

Which means the eleven years are not waste and were never waste, however the story ended. You have not spent a decade of your life on something that fell out of God's hands, because nothing falls out of God's hands. The written word says He gathers up what is left so that nothing is lost, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that true of the parts of your life nobody would think to keep.

Now, the thing worth saying plainly, and it is not a footnote.

The purpose that cannot be stopped is His, not yours. You are inside something that keeps moving when you do not, and that is Job 42:2 in ordinary English: no purpose of His can be thwarted. His Spirit is the one who keeps that true of a person with nothing left to bring. That is why nothing here is going to ask you for more determination, or tell you to try again, or hand you a plan. You have been stopped, more than once, and some of that was illness and some of it was other people and some of it was nothing anybody chose. The momentum was never supposed to be yours. It is His, and you are inside it, sitting on the ramp of a van with your hands empty, and you are no less inside it today than you were on the busiest Saturday of the eleven.

So open your mouth about it. In Matthew 17:20 the measure is a seed, and here it can be the smallest thing in that shoebox, a staple, because the size of it was never the point. The mountain in front of you is a sentence you have been repeating, and you have the standing to speak to it, since you are in Christ and Christ is in you and speaking is the way He appointed. What He then does with those years is entirely His business, and it stays His.