Staying Feels Like A Lack Of Ambition

People she started with have gone to bigger places.

She wants that said without any edge on it, because there is none. They are doing good work. She has visited two of them and been genuinely glad, and one of them rang her last year for advice about something and she was pleased to be asked.

She has stayed here for eleven years with fourteen people.

And she has called it faithfulness the whole time.

Then, about two years ago, a question arrived and it has not left.

Or is she just not brave?

That is the whole of it. She has turned it over on this path more times than she could count, and she cannot answer it, and the reason she cannot answer it is the part that has begun to wear her down.

From the inside, they look exactly the same.

Faithful and frightened. Rooted and stuck. Committed and unable to face the upheaval. There is no test she can run on herself that separates them, because every piece of evidence fits both. Eleven years is proof of loyalty. Eleven years is proof of inertia. The same eleven years.

And so every year she stays adds to both columns at once, and the question gets slightly heavier, and she walks this path and does not get anywhere with it.

If you cannot tell staying from settling, come and lean on this gate a minute. There is a flask and nobody out here is auditing anybody.

What Paul told a church to aim at

There is an instruction in Thessalonians that sounds so unambitious that most people read past it looking for the real one.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Study to be quiet.

Two words in there are doing a great deal. Study, which is effort, and quiet, which is the thing being aimed at. Somebody is being told to work at a small life.

That is not a consolation offered to people who could not manage anything larger. It is an instruction, given to a church that was on fire, by a man who spent his own life traveling and starting things and getting arrested.

He could have told them anything. He told them to study to be quiet, do their own business, and work with their hands.

You are aiming at something Scripture hands out as an instruction rather than tolerates as a compromise. 1 Thessalonians 4:11 puts study and quiet in one command from a man whose own life was anything but, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that instruction in a letter to a church that needed no encouragement to be zealous, which means a quiet life in a small place is a target somebody was aimed at and not a place somebody failed to leave.

Why the question cannot be answered from inside

Now the two years, because the question deserves an answer and the answer is not the one that has been hunted for. You have been trying to determine your own motive. That cannot be done. Not because you are unusually opaque, but because nobody can do it. A motive is not available for inspection by the person holding it, and every year of evidence genuinely does fit both readings, and it will still fit both readings in twenty years. This is not a puzzle anybody is failing to solve. It is a category of question that does not have an internal answer.

You have been running a test on yourself that no person has ever been able to run. 1 Corinthians 4:3 says yea, I judge not mine own self, for I know nothing by myself, yet am I not hereby justified, but he that judgeth me is the Lord, and it is written by somebody deliberately declining to assess his own motives, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things, which means the audit you have been attempting for two years was always going to be somebody else's to complete.

What can actually be known

Here is what is available, since the motive is not.

The work. Fourteen people, eleven years, and whatever has happened in that room in that time, which is a matter of record and not of introspection.

You cannot see your own heart. You can see the eleven years.

You are able to look at what has been done rather than at what you cannot see, and Scripture directs attention there. Galatians 6:4 says let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and it puts the proving on the work rather than on the interior, and it is the same Spirit who bears the fruit that shows, which means the only examination open to you is one you have been walking past for two years.