The Year You Keep Pushing Back

Warren has been going to slow down next year since a year he can no longer remember.

He can pin down roughly when it started. It was somewhere after the second boy was born and before his father died, which puts it in a window of about four years, and he cannot get closer than that, and the fact that he cannot get closer than that is the whole story in one line.

The plan is real. It has details. He is not a man who talks in vague terms about someday: he could tell you what slowing down would look like, what he would hand over and to whom, what he would keep because he actually likes it, what he would do with the first free September of his life.

He has said it out loud at Christmas most years. His wife could recite it.

And every autumn, without any drama and without anybody arguing about it, it becomes next year.

Never further than that. That is the interesting part. It never goes to five years or ten. It moves exactly one year, every year, quietly, and one year is such a small distance that it has never once felt like a postponement. It has felt like a scheduling adjustment.

He worked this out on a gate.

He had been at a funeral for a man four years younger than himself who had had exactly this plan, and Warren stood at his own field gate afterwards with his hat in his hand, and did some arithmetic that he had never done before, which was not about money.

It was about how many times he had said next year.

He got to eleven and stopped counting, and then he stood there for a good while.

Now hear the necessary thing before you start on yourself.

Warren has not been lying. Not to his wife, not to himself, not at any of those Christmases. Every one of those decisions was made honestly, and most of them were made for good reasons, and several of them were made for other people, which is the part that makes them impossible to regret.

And nobody in this message is going to tell you that working hard is a spiritual problem, or that a man ought to have less so that he would rest more. That is the same error upside down, and it does exactly as much damage. The man with plenty is not standing further from God than the man with little, and having less would not have brought that September a single year closer.

The point is not the amount.

The point is that the year has been moving at exactly the speed you approach it, which is the definition of a horizon and not the definition of a date.

You have your own version. There is a year in your head, and there is a figure attached to it, and if you count how many times you have said next year you will get further than you expect.

Nobody is calling you a workhorse or a fool. There is nothing foolish about you.

The date has just never once been a date.

James is not being morbid. He is being practical.

There is a passage in James that people find bleak, and it is not bleak at all once you see what he is actually correcting.

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.James 4:14

He has just quoted a man saying that today or tomorrow he will go to such a city, spend a year there, and make a profit. And James does not object to the going, the year, or the profit. Read it again if you have always assumed he did. Not one word against any of the three.

What he objects to is the confidence about the calendar.

And the thing he says instead, two verses on, is not stop planning. It is say, if the Lord will, we shall live, and do this or that. Which is a plan with a hand open at the end of it rather than a fist.

That is a smaller correction than it is usually preached as, and a kinder one. It leaves a man his September. It just refuses to let him keep spending a year he has not been given.

And now hear what is already true over you standing at that gate. You have today, and it is not a scrap. That is not my consolation: the written word says this is the day the Lord has made, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man with his hat in his hand who has just come from a funeral.

And the rest is not scheduled for a later year. The word says there remains a rest for the people of God, and remains means it is standing open now rather than being released on a date, and the Spirit is the one who hands it over rather than filing it.

Nobody is coming for your work

I want to be very plain, because this is exactly where a message like this tells a man to hand something over that a lot of people are standing on, and I am not going to do that from a distance.

I am not telling you to slow down this year. I do not know what is unfinished, who is depending on the work, or what would fall over. A man who preaches somebody else's retirement is spending money that was never his to spend.

I am not going to name your figure either, in either direction. Not higher, not lower. I do not know your life and it would be arrogant of me to guess at it and worse to say it out loud.

And I am not telling you that eleven years of next year were wasted. They were not. God saw every one of them, and the word says He is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, so the record of all that is being kept somewhere that does not move.

And you are not going to be settled by a figure. That is not pessimism, it is a warning about a rope. The word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and the Spirit lets a man hear that without a bit of fear on it, because he is not standing on that rope in the first place.

Your portion is already recorded. Not pending a year: the word says the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, and thou maintainest my lot, and the maintaining is His verb, and the Spirit is the one doing that keeping while a man stands at a gate on an ordinary evening.