There is a specific chair in the day room and she always ends up in it, the one under the noticeboard, because it is the only one where the arm is on the correct side for the cannula.
She has her phone in her hand and the email is open and she has not replied to it. We are sorry you are unable to join us for the September cohort. Please let us know if you would like us to hold your place for the next intake.
Hold your place. They are being kind. They held it last year and the year before, and each time she wrote back the same bright little paragraph with the word hopefully in it, and each time she meant it, and each time her body had the final say sometime around week three.
She is not going to write that paragraph this time. That is the thing that happened this morning, quietly, between the second blood draw and the tea trolley. She read the sentence would you like us to hold your place, and something in her put the phone face down on her knee and said, out loud, in a room with four other people in it: no. Stop holding it.
And then she cried, which she hates doing in the day room, because the woman opposite is having a much worse day and it feels like taking something.
It is not really the course. She has known that for a while. It is that she has now watched three Septembers go past from a chair, and there is a sentence that has been building underneath all of them, and it is not I am ill. It is: whatever God was doing with me, He has clearly had to do it without me.
You have a version of that sentence. Maybe it is not a hospital. It is a body that will not cooperate, or a house you cannot leave, or a season that ate three years and gave nothing back. The details are yours. The sentence is nearly everybody's, and it is a lie with a very reasonable face on it.
Your body canceled a course, not a purpose
I want to pull two things apart that have been welded together in you for three Septembers, because as long as they are one object nothing here can get near you.
The course stopped. Three times. That is true and I am not going to spiritualize it or tell you the timing was secretly perfect. You wanted to do that thing, you wanted that thing and were right to want it, and your body said otherwise, and grieving that is not unbelief. It is honesty.
The purpose of God did not stop, and it was never the same object as the course. That is the whole thing I have to say to you, and I am putting it at the front rather than saving it for the end where you might not get to. What cannot be stopped is His purpose. Not your energy, not your bloods, not your attendance record.
In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.Ephesians 1:11
Look at the grammar there, because the grammar is the comfort. Him who worketh. Not you who worketh. The verse hands the working to God and hands the inheritance to you, and it does it in a letter written by a man who was, at the time, under house arrest and unable to go anywhere. Paul was not describing a purpose that runs on mobility. He was describing one that had not paused while he sat still.
You are inside that purpose right now, in the chair under the noticeboard with a cannula in the back of your hand, and it has not lost one hour in three years. That is what the written word says over you and not a kind thing I decided to say, and the Holy Spirit who has been working in you through every one of those Septembers is the proof that nothing was ever put on hold pending your health.
See what that does to the arithmetic you have been running. If the thing that keeps moving is His, then a canceled place on a cohort is information about a diary. It is not information about your worth, and it never had the standing to become that.
The three years were not a gap
Here is the second thing, and it lifts weight rather than adding it.
You have been treating those years as a hole in your life. A gap between the last real thing and the next real thing, with you sitting in the middle of it waiting to resume. And that word, resume, is doing enormous damage, because it assumes the work was paused, and it assumes you were the one running it.
You have been carried through every month of those three years, and the carrying did not slow on the days you achieved nothing anybody could put on a form. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that working inside you rather than tapping His fingers waiting for your bloods to come back better.
There is something else worth saying very plainly, because this is exactly the place a message like this goes wrong and it is not going to. Nothing here is telling you to try again in the spring. Not the spring, not ever. If you never sit another exam or attend another cohort for the rest of your life you have not moved one inch outside the purpose of God, because getting inside it was never something you qualified for and staying inside it is not something you keep up by being well enough. That is the difference between being a daughter and being a candidate, and a great many faithful people are quietly living as candidates.
And this is where your mouth comes in, because I am not leaving you with a nice thought to lose by Thursday. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing standing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not thought about between blood draws. And the thing standing in the way is not the illness, and it is certainly not the administrator who wrote you a kind email. It is a sentence: He has clearly had to do it without me. That sentence has run your inner life unchallenged for three years because nobody has ever answered it out loud, and least of all you.
You have real authority to answer it, and that authority is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a person with authority in a paper gown. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how strong you felt while saying them.
None of this is a reason to step back from your treatment, and it is not a hint that faith would make the appointments unnecessary. Keep every one of them. God is not competing with your consultant.
If any of this has taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, please tell a living person today. Your nurse, 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 through a telephone.
So. The chair under the noticeboard, the phone face down on your knee.
Turn both hands over in your lap. Actually turn them, palms up, cannula and all. It looks like nothing and it is not nothing, because your body has been the thing making all the announcements around here and this is your body saying something else.
Say out loud the thing that got canceled. Say it plainly, in the flattest words available. Not the bright paragraph with the word hopefully in it.
Then say one sentence naming who never stopped. Not what happens next, because nothing here is promising you a fourth attempt or asking you to want one, and God has never required anybody to be well in order to remain inside His purpose. Just who never stopped. One sentence, then let it be quiet.
You are not sitting in a three year gap, you are sitting inside a purpose that has been in continuous motion the whole time you have been still. That is the word's account of your Septembers rather than my opinion of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing the moving.
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 the strength you have on a treatment day. What God does next with your life, and what your body does next, is His to decide, and He is not asking you for a plan from that chair.
- Third cancellation, you do not get to write the story of my life. Ephesians says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and you are a date in a diary, and He is a counsel.
- Conclusion that He has been doing it without me, you have no place in my mouth, and I put you out in the name of Jesus. Scripture calls me an inheritance obtained, not a place being held, and an inheritance does not lapse because a body kept canceling.
- Lord, Your purpose stands and I am inside it this morning with my hands open in this chair. I thank You, because Your Spirit never once put the work down while I sat still, and I am done asking anyone to hold my place.
Ephesians 1:11
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.