Whatever Your Hand Finds

The friend did not mean it as a challenge. That is what makes it stick.

They were in a parking lot after something, and she had just explained, cheerfully, why she was not going to take on the thing she had been asked to take on, and the reasons were good and were about keeping her options open, and her friend said, without any edge at all: what are you actually building?

And she laughed, and said something, and got in her car.

She is thirty three. She has moved four times in six years, always for a reason that made sense. She has left two churches, both times before anybody asked her to do anything significant. She has a job she is good at and could leave tomorrow. She rents a flat she likes and has never put a picture on a wall.

She calls it flexibility and other people call it freedom and she has been quietly pleased with it for a long time.

What she noticed, driving home from that parking lot, is that she could not answer the question. Not that the answer was small. There was no answer.

She could tell you what she had kept herself available for, in a general way. She could not name one thing that would still exist in five years because she had put her hands on it.

And underneath, arriving late that night, the thing she has never said out loud: I do not think I actually expect there to be a five years.

Sit down here. There is a verse about work that does not have a single hedge in it.

Do it with your might

Here it is, and it comes from the one book in Scripture most preoccupied with how short life is.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.Ecclesiastes 9:10

That is not a motivational line lifted out of context, and the Spirit inspired the whole argument rather than the slogan. Look at the reason attached. Do it with your might, because there is no working where you are going.

The writer of that book has spent chapters on how brief and how vaporous everything is. He has said it repeatedly and unsentimentally. And the conclusion he draws from the shortness is not withdrawal. It is the opposite. Because it is short, put your whole strength into what is in front of you.

You are being told to build rather than to hover. Ecclesiastes 9:10 draws that conclusion from brevity itself, and the Spirit inspired the argument in that direction rather than in the direction you have been running.

That is worth noticing carefully, because the assumption underneath your six years is that a short horizon justifies a light grip. Scripture's own book about short horizons says the reverse.

What flexibility has been for

Now the honest account, and it is not a scolding.

Flexibility is a real virtue and there are seasons that require it. What has been happening in your life is something else wearing its clothes.

The tell is the pattern rather than any individual decision. Every one of those choices had a good reason, and taken one at a time each of them can be defended. What cannot be defended one at a time is the shape they make together, which is a person who has arranged never to be holding anything when the music stops.

That is not freedom. That is a posture, and postures are held for reasons.

You are permitted to put your hands on something. Nothing written anywhere makes availability a higher calling than work, and the Spirit distributes gifts precisely so that people will build things that outlast them.

And there is a version of this that has to be said plainly, because six years is long enough for it to have got confused with obedience. You are not more available to God for having kept your hands empty. Nothing written anywhere describes availability that way, and the people He used most were carrying things at the time He called them: nets, a plow, a business, a tent trade, a household.

And the sentence that arrived late that night is the actual subject. You do not expect there to be a five years. Everything else, all six years of it, is downstream of that.

Where that sentence came from

Here is the part that will need more than one sitting.

Nobody handed you a date. This is not a story about a man on a platform. What you absorbed is more diffuse and more ordinary: a general atmosphere, accumulated over years, in which the future is provisional and it is faintly unserious to build.

That atmosphere is everywhere at the moment and it is not only religious. But in your case it has taken a religious form, which makes it harder to challenge, because it can present itself as holding things lightly.

Holding things lightly is a real instruction and it is about ownership rather than about commitment. It means not gripping what you have. It has never meant not taking anything up.

You are allowed to want something that lasts. What is written puts might into a person's hands and expects it to go somewhere, and the Spirit is not the source of a rule that has kept every picture off your walls.

Say yes to one thing longer than a year. That is the whole prescription and it is enough.

And expect the reasons to arrive. They will be good ones, the way they always have been, and they will turn up within about two weeks of the commitment being made. That is not discernment. That is the pattern defending itself, and the way through it is to have already told somebody what you have said yes to, because a commitment held privately can be revised silently and one that has been spoken cannot. Nothing written anywhere asked anybody to hold that alone, and the Spirit works through one other person who knows what you said yes to.