Afraid To Start It Badly

She said yes straight away, in the room, in front of everybody, and she has not slept properly since.

They asked her to start it again. It had run for a long time and then it stopped, for reasons that were nobody's fault and are not interesting, and there is a group of people who would like it back and one of them asked her over a cup of tea whether she would be the one.

And she said yes. She meant it. She still means it.

That was seven weeks ago and there is nothing on the ground.

Here is what is actually happening, and she has not been able to say it to anybody in a way that does not sound like a woman fishing for reassurance.

There are people who gave years to this. Some of them gave the best years they had. And a restart that goes badly does not simply go badly. It settles the question. It becomes the proof that it was over, and after that nobody tries again, and the thing those people built is finished for good, and the person who finished it will have been her.

So every version she plans is worse than the last one, because every version now has to be the right one.

And the safest thing she has done for seven weeks is nothing at all.

Somebody said to her, kindly, on the phone, that it is only a Thursday evening.

She said yes, and laughed, and got off the phone, and sat in the car for a while.

It is not a Thursday evening. It is one shot at somebody else's life's work, and it is in her hands, and nobody else in that group appears to have noticed that this is what has been handed over.

If you are frozen in front of something that matters to a lot of people, come and help carry a table. Nobody in this hall needs an answer from you.

The sentence God said to a man in front of a job too big for him

There is a word given to a man responsible for rebuilding something enormous, with a fraction of the resources and a great many people watching, and it is one short sentence.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Read who it is said to. Zerubbabel, who has been given the job of rebuilding a house that people are still alive to remember in its first state, with insufficient materials, under scrutiny, with a real possibility of public failure.

And God does not give him a method. He does not give him a plan, or a budget, or a promise about how it will be received.

He tells him whose strength the thing runs on, and the answer is not his.

You are standing in front of a job that was never going to be done by your capacity. Zechariah 4:6 says not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, and it is spoken to a man holding exactly your assignment, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in the verse itself as the one doing the building, which means the weight you have been carrying for seven weeks was assigned to somebody else from the beginning.

What the fear is actually made of

Now let us look at the sentence underneath the seven weeks, because it is a specific belief and it can be examined.

The belief is: I have one shot, and if I get it wrong it is over for good.

That belief is doing a great deal of work. It is why every plan is worse than the last. It is why nothing has been started. It is also, when you set it down on paper, a claim about how much power one Thursday evening has, and how little God has.

You were never handed the outcome, and the finishing of a thing has never once rested on anybody's first attempt. Philippians 1:6 says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the performing is put on Him rather than on the one it is happening to, and it is the same Spirit who carries a work through seasons nobody planned, which means a Thursday evening that goes badly does not have the authority you have been giving it.

Nothing here promises the restart succeeds. It says the outcome is not the thing in your hands, and it never was.

What those people actually gave their years to

Here is a thing worth turning over, because it changes the weight considerably.

The people who gave years to it did not give them to a Thursday evening. They gave them to what the Thursday evening was for.

Whatever that is, it is not fragile in the way a start is fragile. It survived the stopping. It has been surviving the seven weeks. It is not sitting in your hands waiting to be dropped.

You are holding an occasion rather than the substance, and the substance has never been in anybody's hands to break. Matthew 16:18 has Christ saying upon this rock I will build my church, and the building is His in the first person, and it is the same Spirit who is the one at work in a people rather than an evening, which means what those years went into is being kept somewhere your first attempt cannot reach.