She Has Been Clearing For Two Years

She took the whole of it out. Every bit. It took two years and she did it properly.

She sorted. She labeled. She gave things to people who would use them and she was thoughtful about who got what, and there were four separate trips with a van, and she cried exactly twice and both times in the car afterwards.

People said she was doing so well.

They were right. She was. Anybody who has ever had to do that job knows what it costs and she did it better than most people manage.

On Sunday she stood in the middle of a completely clear space and did not know what to do next.

There is nothing left to clear.

Here is what she has never said out loud, and she only worked it out herself about three weeks ago, standing in that room with a cup of tea going cold in her hand.

Clearing cannot be got wrong.

That is the whole of it. Nobody has ever looked at an empty room and said that was a mistake. Nobody comes round and quietly thinks she has made an odd choice about a room with nothing in it. Clearing is unarguable, and it looks exactly like progress, and it is genuinely honest work, and it asks nothing of her about the future.

The moment she puts one thing into that room, it is a choice.

And a choice can be wrong, and it will be visible, and it will say something about who she is now and what she thinks happens next, and she has not been able to make one for two years.

If you have cleared everything and built nothing, come and sit in the lee of this wall. There is a flask and nobody out here is going to ask you what your plans are.

The question in the middle of the promise

There is a verse people quote for the promise in it and almost never for the question, and the question is the part that will be useful this morning.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?Isaiah 43:18-19

Shall ye not know it.

That is a genuine question, and it is a strange one. It suggests that a person can be standing inside a new thing that is actually springing up and fail to recognize it, which is not what anybody expects.

And notice what makes that possible. A new thing that is springing forth looks, at the beginning, like almost nothing. A first shoot is not impressive. It is small, and it is provisional, and it could be a weed, and nobody would blame you for walking past it.

You are being asked whether you will recognize a beginning that does not look like one. Isaiah 43:19 puts a real question inside the promise about whether the new thing will be known when it springs forth, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that question in rather than assuming anybody would notice, which means the first thing that goes into that room is unlikely to look like enough and is not required to.

What the clearing was for

Now the two years, and let us be fair, because there is a wrong reading of this and it would be cruel.

The clearing was not avoidance. It had to be done, and it took what it took, and doing it properly was an act of love toward people who were not there to see it.

But it did two jobs at once, and only one of them was the job it looked like.

It emptied a room. And it kept you, for two years, in a kind of work where there is no possibility of being wrong.

You have been doing honest work that also happened to be entirely safe, and there is no charge against you for that. Ecclesiastes 3:6 says a time to keep, and a time to cast away, and it puts both in a list of seasons rather than in a hierarchy, and it is the same Spirit who leads a person from one season into the next, which means the casting away was right and its season is finishing.

What a wrong choice would actually cost

Here is the thing under all of it, and it should be said plainly.

The fear is that a decision might be wrong, and visible, and permanent.

Look at what a first thing in a room actually is. It is a chair, or a table, or a picture on a wall. It can be moved. It can be got rid of. It is not a vow and it is not a public statement and no one but you is going to read anything into it at all.

You were never being asked to get it right, and nothing you put in that room today is beyond revision. Proverbs 16:9 says a man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps, and it puts the devising in the person and the directing in God, and it is the same Spirit who leads into the truth a person can hold, which means a wrong first choice is inside the ordinary way anybody is led anywhere.