The Same as Last Time

Robyn is twenty-nine and she does not have a before.

Everybody she knows has one. That is not exaggeration for effect; she has actually gone through it in her head, person by person, in bed, more than once.

There is the friend who went away for a year and came back different. The one who had a proper breakdown at twenty-four and has come out the other side of it and talks about it well. The one who left everything and started something. The one who moved countries. The one who was in a bad place and is not any more, and says so on a stage occasionally, and is not showing off, and it is genuinely a good story.

Robyn has lived in the same city her whole life.

She has been at the same church since she was nine. She has a job that is fine. She had one long relationship that ended at twenty-six without any drama at all, which she is told is unusual and which nobody seems to think counts as an event.

She has never been anywhere. She has never fallen apart. She has never been dramatically wrong about anything and then dramatically right.

She would not describe herself as unhappy. That is not what this is.

It is that she cannot find the shape. Everybody else's life has a turn in it, and hers is a line, and everything she has ever been handed about what a life is supposed to look like assumes a turn.

Her friend asked her to speak for five minutes at something in the spring.

Just share your story.

And Robyn said no, and made a joke about it, and then could not stop thinking about it for two weeks.

Not about the talk. About the fact that she had genuinely nothing to put in the five minutes. She sat down once and tried to draft it as an experiment and got about forty seconds in and it was: I grew up here, and I still go, and I like it.

Her cousin is sixteen and stayed with her in the summer.

And on about the third day, over nothing, in the kitchen, the girl said: "You are the only adult I know who is the same as last time."

She meant it as an observation. She was not being profound and she did not think she had said anything.

Robyn has thought about that sentence more than anything anybody has said to her in five years.

Now let me ask you what your five minutes would be.

Because if this is yours you have already tried to draft it, probably more than once, and you have concluded something about your own life from the fact that it will not fill the slot.

Who despised it

There is a moment in Zechariah that people quote without knowing what it was about, and what it was about makes it much better.

The exiles are back and they have laid a foundation for a new temple. And it is small. Small enough that the old men who remembered the first one wept out loud when they saw it, and the book of Ezra records that you could not tell the weeping from the shouting.

That is the setting. And into that, the word comes.

For who has despised the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

Notice the direction of the rebuke.

It is not aimed at the smallness. Nothing in that verse says the foundation should have been bigger, and God does not tell them to go and produce something more impressive.

It is aimed at the despising.

The problem in that valley was not the size of the thing. It was that people were looking at a real work of God, in progress, and assessing it against a memory, and concluding it was nothing.

And they were wrong, and God says so, and the sentence He uses is a question with an edge on it.

So hear this said over you, sitting on a kitchen counter at twenty-nine with an undraftable five minutes. Your life is not too small to be a work of God, and the verdict you reached is the one God pushes back against by name in that valley. That is written into a question He asked about a foundation people were weeping over, 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 twenty years of the same building.

Now let me be careful about your friends, because I am not going to make their stories smaller.

The one who came out of the breakdown really did. That is not a performance and it is not inflated, and the year that woman went through was genuinely awful and she is genuinely different, and God did something.

Some people get a turn. That is real and it is His, and being glad about it is the correct response.

And I am not going to tell you that your line is secretly better than their turn. It is not a competition and there is no ranking, and anybody who tells a room full of people that quiet lives are holier has just built the same ladder upside down.

Here is what I want to say, and it is about the slot rather than about you.

Share your story is a format, and the format wants an arc.

It has a before and a turn and an after, because that is what holds a room for five minutes, and there is nothing sinister about that. Stories work that way. But it is a format, and formats select.

And you have taken a format's requirement and read it as a description of what a life is supposed to be, and then failed the test, and the test was never a test.

Most people who have ever lived did not have an arc. The overwhelming majority of God's people, in every century, were born somewhere, stayed roughly there, believed, and died, and the vast bulk of what God has done in the world has gone through exactly those people and left almost no anecdote behind it.

Your cousin said the truest thing anybody has said about you and did not know she was doing it. The same as last time. At sixteen, when adults keep changing shape around her, there is one who does not.

That is not the absence of a story. That is a thing you are being for somebody, and it took twenty-nine years of nothing happening to build it.

The word says who has despised the day of small things, and God asked it about a foundation, which is by definition the part nobody sees. 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 line of your life has had Him in it the entire time.