Three Times A Panel Said No

The folder is the wrong thickness to carry comfortably and he has been carrying it under one arm for four hours.

Eleven weeks he put into it. Tabs. A contents page, which he now feels stupid about, and three copies made at a shop because the printer at home would have taken all night.

Three people on the panel. One of them was kind and asked two questions that showed she had read it. One was fine. One had a phone on the table face up.

They said no in the room, which he did not expect and which is apparently the new procedure and is meant to be more respectful, and possibly is.

He is in a car park now and he has not put the folder down.

Third time. The first no he took like a professional and told everybody it was fine. The second no he did not tell anybody about for six days. This one he does not know what to do with, because he has run out of ways to hold it that leave him intact.

And here is the specific thing. Those three people do not know him. They know eleven weeks of paper, and forty minutes, and none of the twenty years underneath it.

The sentence arrives with his hand on the car door. Not they were wrong. It is: three panels have looked at me and said no, and at some point that is not bad luck, that is an assessment.

You know that car park. It might be a panel, or an interview, or an application, or a review of something you built. People with no history with you have looked at a version of you and said no often enough that you have started to accept their arithmetic as a description of yourself.

The door Paul had, and the clause after it

There is a sentence in a letter that gets printed on things about opportunity, and the second half of it is almost never printed with the first.

For a great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries.1 Corinthians 16:9

One sentence, two clauses, joined with an and rather than a but. The door is open. The opposition is real. Both at once, and Paul does not treat the second as evidence against the first.

That is worth sitting in, in a car park, with a folder under your arm. Because everything in you has been reading three refusals as information about whether a door exists. And the man who wrote that verse would tell you that the amount of resistance in front of a thing has never been a reliable reading on whether God has opened it.

Notice too who does the opening in that sentence. It is passive. Is opened unto me. Somebody else opened it. Paul is describing something he received, not something he achieved at his third attempt.

You are somebody God opens doors for, and the opening has never once been graded by a panel. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man holding a folder, and the Holy Spirit who was with you through all eleven weeks of preparing it is the evidence that your standing does not come out of a room like that.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic at the car door. If God opens and there are many adversaries, then three noes is information about three panels, a set of criteria, and forty minutes. It is not an assessment of you, and it never had the standing to become one.

What this page will not promise, and what it will not let you do

Here is the second thing, and it goes both ways.

Nothing here will tell you the fourth application succeeds. Nobody knows. Nothing here will say that God is opening something else right now, because that is a sentence people say to make a car park more comfortable and they have no information.

And nothing here will let three strangers become your enemies. One had a phone face up on a table and that is genuinely poor, and building a case about her over the next two years would cost you a great deal more than it costs her.

You have been carried through all three of those hearings, and the carrying did not depend on the outcome of any of them. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in this rather than sitting on a panel taking notes.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a car park. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not carried under one arm for four hours. And the thing in the way is not the panel and it is not the criteria. It is a sentence: at some point that is an assessment. 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 man with any authority standing beside a car. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the quality of the folder.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, 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.