Waiting For A Proper Start

He could recite the list. He has been over it that many times.

The right money, which is a specific figure and he knows it to the hundred. The right week, meaning a week without three other things in it. The right frame of mind, which is the vaguest item and the one that has quietly become the hardest.

Not one of the three has ever arrived at the same time as the other two.

It has been fourteen months.

He is not lazy. Anybody who knows him would say that first and would be right. He gets up early, he works hard, he has carried a great deal in the last two years and has not once made a fuss about any of it.

He simply has not begun.

And the reason sounds so reasonable that it has never once been challenged by anybody, including himself. It is not a proper start. There is no point beginning a thing badly. Better to wait until it can be done properly than to make a mess that has to be undone.

Everybody nods at that. It is the kind of sentence people agree with.

Here is what happened three weeks ago.

His daughter asked him when they are doing her room.

He said soon, love. When we get sorted.

She said okay, in the entirely untroubled way a child says okay, and went off to do something else, and she has not asked since.

She is nine, and she has stopped asking, and he has thought about that at about two in the morning more nights than he would want to say.

If you are waiting for a proper start, come and sit on the floor with the rest of us. There are sandwiches and nobody here is going to ask what your list has on it.

What a prophet asked a woman with nothing

There is a scene that reads, on the face of it, as though somebody behaved outrageously, and the outrage is the whole point.

And she said, As the Lord thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse: and, behold, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and dress it for me and my son, that we may eat it, and die. And Elijah said unto her, Fear not; go and do as thou hast said: but make me thereof a little cake first.1 Kings 17:12-13

She tells him she has enough for one last meal and then they will starve.

And he asks her to start.

Not with a proper amount. Not once things improve. He asks her to take the visibly insufficient thing in her hands and to begin with it, on the worst day of her life, before anything at all had changed.

That is either the cruelest sentence in the chapter or it is the kindest, and it is the kindest, because the alternative on offer was one last meal and then nothing.

You are being asked to begin with a visibly insufficient thing, and the asking is not cruelty. 1 Kings 17:13 has a prophet requesting a little cake first from a woman who had just described her own last meal, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that request in the record without softening it, which means beginning before there is enough is God's own habit rather than an act of desperation.

The list, taken apart

Now the list, because it is what has cost you fourteen months and it deserves an honest look.

Every item on it is sensible. That is what makes it so effective. Nobody argues with a man who wants to do a job properly.

But look at what the list actually does. It sets a condition, and it puts that condition entirely outside your control, and then it waits. The money is not up to you. The clear week is not up to you. The frame of mind is very much not up to you and never has been.

You have been holding a beginning behind three doors that no one gave you the keys to. Exodus 4:2 has God asking Moses what is that in thine hand, at the exact moment Moses is listing everything he does not have, and it is the same Spirit who moves a person to use what they are actually holding, which means the question in front of you this morning is not what is missing but what is already within reach.

Nothing here says the list is wrong. It says the list is not a gate, and it has been operating as one.

What she has stopped asking about

Here is the two in the morning thing, said plainly, because it is the real one.

A nine year old stopped asking.

That is not a rebuke and it is not going to be turned into one. Children stop asking about all sorts of things and it does not mean the damage anybody fears at two in the morning.

But it is information, and it is worth having.

You were not being judged by that child, and nothing has been lost that a beginning cannot reach. Nehemiah 4:6 says so built we the wall, for the people had a mind to work, and it is written of a job that started in rubble and in mockery rather than in good conditions, and it is the Spirit of God who puts a mind to work in a person, so what she needs to see is not a finished room, it is a father who has started.