Nine months, and it is written on the second page of a notebook she can find in about four seconds.
The thing is not enormous. It is a thing she is fairly sure she is supposed to do, which involves other people, and which would take about an hour a week to start and probably a great deal more if it worked.
She has told three friends about it. All three said yes, do that. One of them asks about it roughly every six weeks in a way that is loving and has become slightly awful.
Here is the sentence she uses, out loud, and she has said it to all three of them.
I am waiting until I feel ready.
She means it sincerely. She is not lying to anybody. She has a picture of what ready would feel like, and it is not dramatic: a kind of settledness, a clear morning where the thing seems obvious and light rather than heavy and vague. She has been waiting for one of those since October.
In June she wrote something in the same notebook that she has not looked at since, and it is this: has that feeling ever come first, about anything?
She wrote it and then closed the book, which is what a person does with a question they already know the answer to.
Driving lessons. The job she has now. The conversation with her sister in the spring before last. Every single thing she has ever done that mattered, she did while feeling roughly the way she feels this morning, and the settledness turned up about four minutes into the doing, every time, and never once before it.
She has been waiting nine months for a thing that has never in her life arrived first.
We walk by faith, not by sight
Sit down with the notebook shut, because there is a short sentence in Corinthians that describes what a person actually does in this position, and the verb in it is physical.
For we walk by faith, not by sight.2 Corinthians 5:7
We walk.
Not we wait by faith. Not we feel by faith. Walking is what the legs do, and it happens in the body, and it happens while the eyes are reporting nothing useful.
And notice the contrast he draws. Not by sight. Sight is the faculty that confirms. He is describing people who are moving while the confirming faculty is offline, and he is not describing that as a hardship or an emergency. He puts it in the present tense as the ordinary condition: this is how we go about.
Hear this at your own counter. You are not unready, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture describes the normal Christian mode as walking with the confirming sense not yet reporting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves in that walking, so the settledness was never the starting gun.
Now let me name what nine months of waiting has done, because it has not been neutral.
The thing has grown.
That is what happens to an unstarted thing, and it is exactly why the written word puts the walking first and why the Holy Spirit moves in the going. It gains weight every month it sits there, because it is being carried and not done, and a thing you have carried for nine months is nine months heavier than the thing you could have started in October.
That is why the picture of ready keeps receding. You are not waiting for a fixed feeling; you are waiting for a feeling large enough to lift an object that gets heavier every time you check on it.
Hear this too, and let it come off the second page. You are not stalling, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the walking first and the sight second, and the Spirit of God has never once withheld a feeling to keep somebody in place, and there is no verse anywhere requiring a person to feel settled before they are permitted to begin.
And now what your notebook already knows, because you wrote the question in June and closed the book on it.
The feeling has never come first. Not once, in your whole life, about anything that mattered.
That is not a flaw in you. That is how it works for almost everybody and nobody says so, and the four minutes is the thing to hold: not four weeks, not four days. About four minutes into the doing, the settledness turns up, and it has done every single time.
So today you do four minutes of it.
Not the thing. Four minutes of the thing, badly, on a morning that feels exactly like every other morning has felt since October.
Open the file and write two sentences. Send the one message that has to go first. Look up the one fact you need. Four minutes, on a timer if that helps, and then stop and go and do something else.
You are not committing to it. You are not launching anything. Nobody has to be told.
Because the written word puts the walking before the sight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves while the confirming sense is still reporting nothing, so nothing about beginning was ever waiting on a feeling.
And watch what happens at about minute four, because you already know what happens at about minute four. You have known since June and you closed the book on it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these standing at the counter with the timer set. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the Holy Spirit moves in the walking according to the written word, so the standing you speak from was never built out of feeling ready. Whether this becomes something or comes to nothing at all, the outcome is His to decide, and it is never a measure of a woman who waited nine months in good faith.
- Feeling I have been waiting on, you are not the starter and you never were. Scripture says we walk by faith and not by sight, and walking is what the legs do while the confirming sense is reporting nothing at all.
- Picture of ready that gets further away every month, get off this counter, in the name of Jesus. The written word puts the walking before the sight, and the Spirit of God has never withheld a feeling to keep anybody in place.
- Lord, You are the God we walk with by faith, and Your Spirit moves in the walking rather than in the waiting, exactly as it is written. I am doing four minutes of it today on an ordinary morning, badly, before I feel one thing.
2 Corinthians 5:7
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