I Have Never Unpacked

Renée has three boxes in a spare room that have moved with her four times and have never been opened.

She knows roughly what is in them. Books, some pictures, the things you put on a shelf when a place is where you live rather than where you are staying.

She is forty-four.

When she was nineteen, people said things about her. Not one person and not one occasion: over about two years, several people who loved her said, in different words, that God had something for her, something large, and that she should be ready.

They meant it kindly. Some of them were right about her, in the sense that she is a remarkable woman and everybody who has ever worked with her says so.

And she believed it, and she has been ready ever since.

Ready has a cost and the cost has been paid in twenty-five installments.

She has never bought anywhere. She has rented for twenty-five years, always with a short notice period, because you cannot be tied down.

She turned down two things. Both good, both would have been years, both would have meant putting something in the ground.

And she has run the Thursday group for eighteen years.

Eighteen. About fourteen women on an average week, and it has been going since she was twenty-six, and she started it because there was nothing and somebody had to.

And here is the thing about that group in Renée's own mind: it is what she does while she waits.

That is not a slight against those women. She loves them. It is simply the file it is in.

Somebody introduced her in the spring at a thing. Said her name, and then said, "She has been running that group for eighteen years."

And Renée heard herself say, "For now."

Out loud, into a room. Eighteen years, and for now.

She thought about it for a week.

And then in the summer a woman who was in that room years ago, and who has moved away and had a whole life since, said something to her at a wedding. She said it simply and moved on, the way people do when they do not know they are handing you something.

She said: "That room saved my life."

And Renée stood there with a drink in her hand and thought, quite clearly: that room is the waiting room.

Now let me ask you what you have kept packed.

Because if this is yours there is something. A box, a lease, a decision you have kept reversible, and you have called it faith, and it has been running for a very long time.

The woman who never left

Luke gives four verses to somebody who does nothing dramatic in them at all.

And there was a prophetess, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years and had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple, serving night and day with fastings and prayers.Luke 2:36 to 37

She never left the temple, serving night and day.

Do the arithmetic on that, because Luke expects you to. She was married seven years and has been a widow for most of a lifetime, and the whole of it was spent in one building.

Decades. Not decades of waiting for something to happen: Luke uses the word serving, and he fills it in with fasting and prayer, night and day. He is not describing a woman biding her time. He is describing what she did with her life.

And then, on one ordinary day, a couple comes in with a baby and two birds, because two birds is what you bring when you cannot afford a lamb.

And she is there.

At that very moment she came up and began giving thanks to God, and continued to speak of Him to all those who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

She is in the room because she never left it. That is the whole mechanism. Nobody sent for her, nobody scheduled it, and the reason she saw what she saw is that she had been in that building for years doing what Luke calls service.

So hear this said over you, standing at a wedding with a drink in your hand. The eighteen years are not the waiting, they are the work, and Anna's decades in one building are called service by Luke and not one word of them is described as a delay. That is written into four verses about a woman who never left, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one at work in a believer to will and to do, and He has been at work in a Thursday room for eighteen years through you.

Now let me be careful about the people who spoke over you at nineteen.

I am not going to say they were wrong.

I do not know. Some of what they said may well have been true and may well have already happened, in a shape nobody there would have recognized, because fourteen women in a room on a Thursday is not what a nineteen-year-old pictures when somebody says the word large.

And I am not going to tell you nothing is coming.

I do not know that either. God does move people, sometimes late, and Anna's own moment came when she was very old, and if He moves you at fifty-two He will not need your notice period to be short.

Here is what I am actually saying.

You put your life on a short lease at nineteen and you have renewed it for twenty-five years.

And the cost has not been paid in what you turned down. It has been paid in how you hold everything you actually have. There is a whole life in those eighteen years and you have been living in it the way a person lives in temporary accommodation, and that is why for now came out of your mouth in front of a room.

Being ready is a good instinct. But a thing that is always ready to leave never puts anything in the ground, and Anna is the counter-picture: a woman so thoroughly not going anywhere that when the moment finally walked through the door she was already standing in the right building.

The word says He who began a good work in you will perfect it, and the beginning and the perfecting are both His. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure, which means the Thursday group has been His work happening rather than your holding pattern.