In The Meantime

Priya has a folder on her laptop called After, and she has been adding to it for eleven years.

It is a good folder. It is not a fantasy folder full of houses she will never own. It is careful and it is realistic and there are dates in it, and most of what is in there she is genuinely on track for, because Priya is the most organized person in any room she walks into and everyone who has ever worked with her would tell you so.

The folder is about the life that starts once things are settled.

Once the course is finished. Once the thing at work resolves. Once her mother is a bit better, once the boys are older, once the last of it is cleared. Then. Then the good part starts, and the good part is properly planned, and she can describe it to you in detail.

And one evening in November she was sitting on the floor of the front room with her back against the sofa, and her youngest was asleep upstairs, and she opened her banking app for no reason at all.

She scrolled. And what she saw was a page that was almost entirely about After.

Everything on that column pointed somewhere else. It was all forward. It was disciplined and it was sensible and there was not one item on it she would take back.

And she could not find the front room anywhere.

Eleven years of Tuesday evenings, and boys who were four and are now fifteen, and a mother who is not getting better, and a woman sitting on a carpet at half past nine with her back against a sofa. That life. The one actually happening. It had been running the whole eleven years on whatever was left at the end, which some months was something and most months was nothing at all.

She said, out loud, in an empty room: what have I been doing.

Now I want to get in front of something before it gets in front of you, because the accuser would love five minutes with a woman in that moment.

Priya has not wasted eleven years. Let me say it plainly. She has not been foolish, she has not been cold, she has not been secretly avoiding her own life. She has been doing exactly what a responsible person does when they are carrying more than one person's worth of weight, and half the people reading this are only still standing because somebody like Priya planned like that on their behalf.

Planning is not the enemy here. Storing is not sin. Nothing in this message is going to tell you that being sensible about the future is a failure of faith, because that is a stupid thing to say and it has wrecked a lot of good households.

Here is the only thing that has happened. A woman has been faithfully funding a life that has not started, and the life that did start has been living on scraps, and nobody ever decided that.

You have your own version. Yours might not be a folder. But there is a room somewhere that you are actually in, tonight, with actual people in it, and if a stranger read your page they would not be able to find that room anywhere on it.

Nobody is accusing you of anything. Nothing here is a rebuke.

There is simply a life you are living that has never once been funded, and it is the one you are in.

Hope deferred is a real condition, not a weakness

There is an old proverb for exactly this and it does not scold anybody.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.Proverbs 13:12

Read it as a diagnosis and not as a telling off. It does not say hope deferred makes a person disobedient. It says it makes the heart sick, which is medical language, which means the tiredness you have been carrying for years is not a character flaw and never was.

And now hear what is already settled over you, because it is the ground everything else stands on. You are not sick because you failed at something. That is not my sympathy talking: the written word names deferred hope as a condition and never as a fault, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman on a carpet at half past nine so her shoulders come down instead of going up.

And you are not waiting for God to start. He is not somewhere in After holding the good part back until the last thing clears. The word says this is the day the Lord has made, and His Spirit is the one who makes that true in a front room with homework on the floor and a game nobody finished.

Then hear what Jesus said, and hear the direction of it, because near everybody runs it backwards. Where the treasure is, there the heart will be also. The treasure goes first. The heart follows it and settles there.

Which means, and this is the part I want you to catch, that a heart can be led home. You are not required to feel your way back into your own front room. You move one small thing toward it and the heart comes along behind, at the speed hearts travel, which is slower than we would like and far more reliable than we believe.

What eleven years of forward does to a person

I am not going to tell you to stop planning. I want to be very clear, because this is where a message like this stops being ministry and turns into advice, and I am not competent to give you advice about a single figure in your life.

But I will tell you what happens to a household that only ever points forward.

The people in it learn that the present is a waiting room. That is not taught, it is absorbed, and children absorb it faster than anybody. A boy who has been fifteen years in a waiting room does not remember being told to wait. He simply grows up knowing that real life is elsewhere and later, and he will carry that into his own house without ever once being able to say where he got it.

That is not a guilt trip. That is the reason this matters enough to write about.

And you have permission to spend on the life you are in. Not permission you have to earn by finishing the course first: the word says every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, and the Spirit is the one who lets a daughter live like a daughter in her Father's house rather than a caretaker minding it for somebody who has not arrived.