The Application She Never Submitted

The tab is still open. It has been open, in one form or another, for about two years.

It is finished. That is the strange part and it is what makes it difficult to explain to anybody. The personal statement is written and rewritten and is genuinely good. The two references are in. The fee is not enormous and she has the money. There is a green button.

She has moved it to a new browser twice.

She is twenty six. She is good at her job and slightly bored in it and has been told by two different people, unprompted, that she should do this. Her mother asks about it in a way that is trying not to be pressure and is.

And when she sits down to press the button, something happens that she has never been able to name accurately, and the nearest she can get is: what is the point.

Not despair. She wants to be clear about that, because when she said something like this to a friend the friend went concerned in a way that ended the conversation. It is not despair. It is more like a shrug that arrives from somewhere else, at exactly the moment she reaches for something long.

She worked out where it comes from about six months ago and has told nobody.

She was fourteen. There was a youth weekend, and a man, and a talk that was mostly about how little time there was. She remembers the phrase about not making plans that you will not need. She remembers not being frightened by it, particularly, and she remembers agreeing with it, because it seemed obviously true and she was fourteen.

Sit down. There is a verse about plans and steps and it does not say what she was told.

The plans are assumed

Here it is, and the striking thing is what it takes for granted.

The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.Proverbs 16:9

Read the first half. The heart of man plans his way. That is not being criticized. It is stated as what human beings do, in a book of wisdom, without a hint of disapproval, and the sentence goes on from there rather than turning back to correct it.

What the second half does is not cancel the planning. It puts something underneath it. The Lord establishes the steps, which means the plan is made by a person and the walking of it is held by God, and the two are described as working together rather than as competing.

You are allowed to plan a life. Proverbs 16:9 has the planning as the ordinary business of a human heart and the establishing as God's, and the Spirit inspired that as a partnership rather than as a warning about ambition.

That is the exact opposite of what a fourteen year old heard on a weekend away.

What the man at fourteen actually did

Now the talk, because it needs looking at rather than being carried.

He was not lying and he probably was not careless. He believed what he said. And what he said was a prediction, delivered to a room of teenagers, with an application attached: do not build anything long.

A prediction is a claim about when. Nobody has been given the when. That means the whole application rested on something nobody was in a position to supply, and it was handed to a fourteen year old who was not equipped to notice.

And an instruction like that does not sit in a person as an opinion about the future. It sits as a rule about what is allowed, which is why it can still stop a hand over a green button twelve years later without ever presenting itself as a belief.

You were not given wisdom that day. Nothing written anywhere told anybody not to build, and the Spirit does not produce a shrug at the exact moment a person reaches for something long.

What steady actually looks like

Here is the correction, and it is not permission to be reckless.

The people in Scripture who were most certain that Christ was coming are the people who planted, married, built, traveled, wrote letters about arrangements for next year, and told a young man to bring a cloak he had left behind. Their expectation and their ordinary lives ran alongside each other without friction, because the expectation was never an argument against a life.

The only thing the New Testament actually warns against is the opposite failure: people who had stopped working, who were living off other people, and who had to be told firmly to get back to it.

That is the one recorded case of somebody letting this affect their plans, and it is reported as a problem rather than as devotion.

Which is worth stating in the other direction, because it is the whole point. There is no passage anywhere in which somebody is commended for winding down. Nobody in that book is praised for having stopped building, stopped training, stopped planting or stopped planning on the grounds that the time was short. The commendations all run the other way, to people found doing their work when the master arrived, and the Spirit inspired every one of those pictures.

You are permitted to want it and to press the button. What is written puts the planning in a human heart and the steps in God's hand, and the Spirit is the one who establishes rather than the one who cancels.

And press it soon rather than perfectly. Two years of a finished application is a long time for a good thing to sit still.

One more thing, because it will come up the moment your hand moves. The shrug will probably arrive again, on the day, at the last second, and it will feel like a signal. It is not a signal. It is a groove twelve years deep, and grooves do not distinguish between good decisions and bad ones, they only object to being crossed. Notice it, say one sentence out loud about who holds the day, and press it while the sentence is still in the room.