She Has Been Getting Ready For Twenty Years

She runs the Tuesday. She runs the Thursday. She is on the rota for Saturday and she covers when somebody drops out, which is most weeks.

When a hand goes up in a meeting for one more thing, hers goes with it. Not reluctantly. Genuinely, and fast, and often before the sentence has finished.

People say they do not know how she does it all, and they say it admiringly, and she takes it well.

Last month somebody said something else.

It was after a big evening, and the hall was emptying out, and a woman about her age put a hand on her arm and said, sit down. We have got this one.

And she heard her own voice go up half an octave and say, no, honestly, I am fine.

Then she went and stacked chairs that did not need stacking.

And when the last of them had gone and the hall was empty, she stood in the middle of it with her hands empty for about forty seconds, and she did not like it.

That is what she has been carrying since. Not the tiredness. The forty seconds.

Because when she went looking for what she thought was going to happen in those forty seconds, she found something she had never once put into words in twenty years.

She has been calling all of it getting ready.

Nobody taught her that. She assembled it herself, out of a very good work ethic and one long fear, and it has hardened into something she would not be able to find a verse for. That if she keeps moving, and keeps being useful, and keeps saying yes, then when it comes she will be found in the middle of something and it will be all right.

And underneath that, quietly, the other half. That if she is ever found standing still with her hands empty, something will be found in her that all the moving has been covering.

She has never asked herself what. She has been careful not to.

If you have not stood still in years, come and take one of those chairs back off the stack. Nobody is doing anything else tonight.

Whose job the presenting is

There is a verse about being presented to God at the end, and the striking thing is who is holding the verb.

In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.Colossians 1:22

To present you. He does that.

And look at the three words He is presenting you as. Holy. Unblameable. Unreproveable. Not improving. Not on the way. Those are finished words, and they describe what He hands over, not what you assemble in time to be handed.

And the means is named right at the front of the sentence. In the body of his flesh through death. That is what it cost and that is who paid it, and there is nothing anywhere in that verse for anybody else to add.

You are being presented by somebody else, and the holy and the unblameable are what He is bringing rather than what you are producing. Colossians 1:22 puts the presenting entirely in Christ's hands and describes the state He presents you in as already settled, and the Holy Spirit kept it written that way rather than as a target, which means twenty years of one more thing was never what was holding the readiness together.

The work was real, and it was doing a second job

Let us be fair to the twenty years, because they are about to be misread and that would be a shame.

The Tuesday is real. The Thursday is real. There are people in that building who were carried through the worst year of their lives by a woman who kept saying yes, and heaven has that written down properly.

The work is not the problem. What got hung on the work is the problem.

You have twenty years of genuine service behind you and no accusation standing anywhere near it. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, and it is written as a plain assurance rather than as an encouragement to do more, and it is the same Spirit who works love through a person rather than out of them, so none of that is being taken off you tonight.

What is being lifted is the second job. The list was never load bearing, and it has been carrying a weight it was never built for.

The forty seconds

Now the empty hall, because that is the actual subject and everything else has been standing in front of it.

The fear is that stillness is where you get found out. That the moving is a covering, and that underneath it there is something that would not survive being looked at.

You were already looked at, all the way down, before any of the Tuesdays started. Psalm 139:1 says O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me, and it is written in the completed past by a man who found that fact a comfort rather than a threat, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the deep things of God and of a person, which means the inspection you have been outrunning finished a long time ago and the verdict came back holy.

There is nothing in that hall waiting to be discovered. He was in there for the forty seconds and He has been in there for all twenty years.