He Would Rather It Came Later

The preacher asked the room whether they were looking for that day, and every hand round him went up, and his went up with them.

And he meant it. He wants to be clear about that, out here, where nobody is listening.

But at the same moment his hand went up he was looking through the side window at the field, and his two grandchildren were out in it, and something underneath everything else in him said, quite distinctly, not just yet though.

He has never told anybody that.

Not his wife, not the man he has known since school. He has carried it for about six years, since the eldest was born, and it has grown rather than faded.

He would like to see her married. That is the honest shape of it. He would like to see what she makes of herself. He would like about fifteen more summers on this ground, and he would like to teach the boy the things his own grandfather taught him, and he would like to be at the gate on an evening like this one a good few more times.

And he believes, in a place he has never examined, that a real Christian would not want any of that. That a proper believer would be straining forward with an empty heart for anything else, and that the fact he would rather have another decade of ordinary evenings is evidence of something thin in him.

So the hand goes up, and the preference gets pushed down, and the two of them have never once been allowed in the same room.

He said it out loud once, to the dog, on the way down to check a fence. He heard how it sounded and did not say it again.

If you have a preference you have been ashamed of, come and lean on the gate a while. The light is good and nobody out here is going to ask you to rank anything.

An apostle held both, in writing, and never picked

There is a passage where Paul says out loud, in a letter that got kept, the exact thing a man hides for six years.

For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.Philippians 1:23-24

In a strait betwixt two. That is a man saying he is caught between two wants and cannot resolve them.

He does not resolve them either. He states both. He says departing is far better, in plain words, and he says staying is more needful, and then he moves on and writes about something else, and the two of them sit there in Scripture side by side to this day.

Nobody edited that. Nobody put a line underneath explaining which one a mature believer ought to feel. The tension is the text.

You are holding two wants that an apostle held in one sentence, and the holding of both is not a failure of either. Philippians 1:23 has Paul calling the departing far better and the abiding more needful in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit kept the strait betwixt two in the letter rather than a tidier version, which means the not just yet underneath your raised hand has apostolic company.

The wanting of ordinary years is not a thinness

Now the shame, because that is what has actually been carried for six years, and it has been carried alone.

You have been reading a love of fifteen more summers as evidence of loving this world too much. Turn it over. What is out in that field is not the world. It is two children God gave you, on ground you have worked, in a life He handed over. Wanting more of that is not a competing affection. It is gratitude with a future tense on it.

You were not being pulled away by wanting more of what He gave you, and no verse anywhere treats a love of ordinary years as a disloyalty. John 10:10 says I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly, and it is written of this life rather than only of the next, and it is the same Spirit who is called the giver of life, which means the pull toward another decade at that gate came from somewhere holy.

Nothing here is going to work on you through fear

Let us say what will not be done out here, because a man braces for it and the bracing costs something.

No scenarios. Nothing off the news, nothing read as a countdown, no attempt whatsoever to move you by making you afraid of the timing. That has never been a legitimate way to move anybody and it is not going to be used at this gate.

You are not being driven by dread, and nothing being handed over this evening runs on it. 2 Timothy 1:7 says God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and the Spirit named in that verse is the one given instead of the fear, which means the register you were made for on this subject is gladness and it always was.