Fifty Minutes on Foot

He walks to the yard now. It takes fifty minutes, and he tells people it is the best part of his day, and he means that about eighty per cent of the time.

He does not tell people why he walks.

The lads know something happened, in the way a yard knows things: nobody has ever asked and everybody has adjusted. Somebody put a hook up by the kettle for his rucksack and said nothing about it at all. The apprentice borrows his tape measure most mornings and gives it back most evenings, and this morning he watches his own hand pass it across and thinks, briefly, without wanting to, about the other things he has handed over.

The one he does not talk about was not a tape measure. It was the biggest thing he had. He handed it over on the strength of a sentence read out from the front of a room, in a season when he believed God with everything that was in him, and he was not naive when he did it and he will not have it called naive now. He prayed. He waited. He watched the calendar go round twice.

Nothing opened.

And you know the shape of this, because you handed something over too, and it was not the same thing. A house. A year. A job you were good at. A name you had spent half your life building. What has been eating you since is not the loss of the thing. It is the arithmetic you have been doing ever since, where the state of your life gets read back to you as God's written reply about you.

The sum nobody taught you and everybody does

Here is how it goes. You gave. Nothing changed, or things got harder. Therefore, somewhere in the middle of that, a verdict was passed.

It is never that blunt in a person's head. It arrives as a tone rather than a sentence: a small flinch when somebody says God is faithful, a habit of praying at length for other people and skipping straight past yourself, a joke about yourself that lands a bit harder than you meant it to.

I am not going to argue you out of the disappointment. You are allowed to be disappointed with God, and Scripture is not remotely embarrassed by that: the Holy Spirit inspired a whole book of songs in which people say so to His face, at length, and He kept every one of them. Not one of them was ever scolded for putting it plainly.

What I will do is take one thing out of your hands, because it was never issued to you: the reading. The interpreting. The turning of your circumstances into a message from God about your standing with Him.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

You are held by a God who cannot go back on Himself, and He did not go back on you in that season. That is not my kindness talking over the top of your facts; it is what the written word says about His actual nature, and it is His Spirit who makes a line like that stand up straight in a person who has stopped expecting much.

Circumstances were never the language He answers in

A silence is not a sentence. An empty diary is not a paragraph. The state of your life this morning is a set of facts about a world that is fallen and complicated and full of other people's decisions, and reading it as a letter from God is very like reading the weather as a letter from God.

He does speak. He speaks in His word, He speaks by His Spirit, He speaks through people who love you. He has never once chosen to say something important to somebody by rearranging their circumstances and leaving them to break the code on the walk to work.

You have His word on this and you have had it the whole time. Scripture says He is not unjust, and that He does not overlook the work and the love shown for His name, and the Holy Spirit is not an accountant who mislaid a page. What went unanswered is not the same thing as what went unnoticed.

The one being tested was never you

There is a place in the prophets where God does something He almost never does. He invites people to test Him. Not to test themselves. Him. The whole grammar of it runs one direction, and the moment it gets turned around so that the reader is the one under examination, a Father has been swapped for a mechanism.

Read the chapter it sits inside and what you find is a nation, a building with a store in it, and people who served there needing something to eat. Food on a table for human beings. That is the setting. It is not a lever, it never was one, and a Father asking to be trusted is not the same species of thing as a machine that pays out.

So here is the strangest comfort in this article: when the machine did not work for you, no machine had ever been installed. Nothing broke. Nothing of that kind was ever running in the first place.

You were never the one on trial, and you are not on trial this morning either. The word puts that invitation in God's own mouth, offering His own faithfulness to be found true, and His Spirit is the one who makes a Father recognizable as a Father again after somebody has spent a long time reading Him as a system.

What the disappointment has not cost you

Here is something I notice, at a distance, and I could be wrong about your details. You are still turned toward Him. You would have closed this at the second paragraph otherwise.

You are still facing His direction, and that facing is His work in you rather than stubbornness on your part. Scripture calls Him the one who guards what has been entrusted to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept an ember alive in a man who walks fifty minutes and does not talk about why.

And I am not going to do the thing you are braced for. I will not tell you that something is coming now instead, or that the wait was the run up to a bigger delivery. I do not know that. Nobody writing to a stranger knows that. Somebody who has already been handed one confident sentence about their future does not need a second one from me.

What can be said, and said without a single condition attached, is this: He has not withdrawn.