The One You Keep Delaying

Vance decided seven years ago, and he has decided again about nine times since, and it is still there.

He is clear about the decision. That is what makes this different from a man who has not made his mind up. If you sat down with him he would tell you plainly that it needs to go, that he settled it in himself a long while back, and that he is not confused about it in any way at all.

And every time the moment has come up, there has been a reason.

Good ones. That is the thing I want you to hear before anything else, because it would be easy to read this and think Vance is weak, and he is not. The reasons have been genuine every time. One year it was the wrong season and it truly was. One year somebody in the family had a bad stretch and it would have been the wrong week to be doing anything at all. Twice it was money and both times the arithmetic was correct.

Nine reasons, and I would have agreed with about eight of them.

He worked out what was actually going on in a barn doorway with a cup of coffee, which is where most of his working out has ever happened, and what he saw was not the reasons.

He saw that the reasons had a pattern. They arrived. Every single time, without him ever going looking for one, a reason turned up in good time, and it was always a real one, and it was always about something other than the thing.

And a man who has never once had to invent an excuse in seven years is not a man who is out of luck. He is a man whose hand has been quietly doing recruitment.

Now hear the thing that has to be said, and I mean it.

Vance is not a coward and he is not a procrastinator. This is a man who does hard things. He has buried people, he has stood up in rooms where nobody else would, and if there is a job nobody wants doing at four in the morning he is generally the one doing it.

That is precisely why this one has survived. A man who cannot do hard things gets caught out fast. A man who can do them can carry one exception for seven years and nobody, including him, thinks to ask why the exception is there.

You have your own. Something got settled in you a long while back, and every time the moment came there was a reason, and the reasons were real, and there have been more of them than you would like to count.

Nobody is asking you for it. Let me say that early and I will say it again. There is no ask at the end of this and there is no plate anywhere in it.

The verse is about the neck, not the hand

There is a line about a plow that most folks hear as a threat and that is really a piece of practical observation.

No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.Luke 9:62

Anybody who has ever plowed knows exactly what He is describing and it is not a moral failing. If you turn your head, the line goes crooked. Not because you have sinned. Because the body follows the face, and you cannot hold a line on ground you are not looking at.

He is not saying a man who glances back is disqualified from being loved.

He is saying you cannot cut a straight furrow while facing the wrong way, and He says it as somebody who wants the man to have a straight furrow.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not disqualified. That is not my softening: the written word says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man in a barn doorway who has just counted to nine.

And you are not being asked to have more resolve. The word says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and the willing is named first and it is His work, and the Spirit is the one who does that working, which means the seven years were never a test of how much you could grit.

Nobody is asking you for anything

Now let me be very plain, because this is where a message like this becomes a collection, and if it does that it has become the exact thing this site exists to refuse.

Nobody here wants your thing. There is no appeal for money at the end of this article and there never will be one on any page here. Nothing on this site is held back behind a payment, nothing is gated, nobody is going to suggest that opening your hand about something is what qualifies you to receive from God, and if you ever read a page that does, close it and do not go back.

There is no plate. Say it to yourself if you need to.

I am also not going to tell you what your thing is or that it must go this month. I do not know your situation. Some of those nine reasons may have been the Lord Himself holding a door shut, and a man in a barn doorway is better placed to know that than a stranger writing at a distance.

And nothing about your standing has been affected by the delay. The word says the Lord is not slack concerning His promise, and His patience is described there as something aimed toward people rather than as something running out, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt fact rather than a theological point.

What the grip is actually round

The thing worth looking at here is not the object and it is not the reasons.

It is the recruiting.

Because a hand that produces a good reason on schedule, nine times, in seven years, is doing something more organized than hesitating. It is protecting something, and the something is almost never what the object appears to be.

Sometimes what is being protected is a version of a man that goes with the thing. Sometimes it is the last piece of an arrangement he has otherwise let go of entirely. Sometimes it is a promise made to somebody who is no longer here to release him from it.

None of those are contemptible. All of them are worth naming, and all of them can be named alone, in a doorway, with a cup, and never spoken to another living soul.

And whatever it is protecting, He is able to keep instead. Not once you let go: the word says He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day, and able is the word chosen there, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real place to set a thing down rather than a phrase.