Waiting for the Start Whistle

There is a list on her phone called after, and Nia does not remember starting it.

It has forty-one items on it. Some of them are quite specific. Ring the woman from the course. Ask about the room on Thursday mornings. Write to the two people who wrote to her in 2021. Learn the thing she has been meaning to learn since before her second child.

And in her head, without her ever deciding it, all of them sit behind a single event that has not happened.

She would not put it like that if you asked her. She would say she is busy, which is true, and that timing matters, which is also true.

But she noticed something in February that she has not been able to unnotice.

She was praying, properly, on her own, and she heard the shape of her own praying for the first time. Everything was set after a starting point. When You move here. When this place wakes up. When it begins. Every sentence in the whole twenty minutes was constructed around a future moment that would change conditions, and after which the real things would become possible.

She is thirty-six. She has been praying like that for about nine years.

And what it has quietly produced is a woman with an enormous amount of readiness and no current activity. She has read the books. She has the folder. She could tell you exactly what she would do. And there is a list of forty-one perfectly ordinary things, most of which need nothing except an afternoon, all of which are sitting behind a whistle that has not been blown.

She said something about it to her sister in the spring, sideways, the way you do.

Her sister, who does not go to church and does not know the vocabulary, said, what are you waiting for, though?

And Nia gave a long answer, and heard herself giving it, and it was the first time she had said the whole thing out loud to somebody who had no framework for it, and it sounded, in her sister's kitchen, quite unlike it sounds in her own head.

And you may have your own list. And yours may not have a name on it, and it may be longer than forty-one, and it may be older than nine years.

The power was never going to arrive as circumstances

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have been carrying it for nine years and it was never yours.

You are not on hold. You never were. Scripture puts the source of everything that matters somewhere entirely other than in conditions, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a change in the weather around you, who supplies power for ordinary obedience. Set the list down here on the table. It is heavy, and forty-one items is a lot to be holding.

Now hear the sentence, and hear where it locates the power.

Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty.Zechariah 4:6

It is said to a man in charge of a rebuilding project that had stalled, surrounded by every reason to wait, in a city that was in no condition for anything.

And God does not say wait until conditions improve. He does not describe a starting point. He redirects the question entirely: the thing you are waiting for is not might and it is not power and it is not favourable circumstances, and it never was. It is His Spirit, and His Spirit is not a season, and that is the written word standing over your list.

Which means the resource you have been waiting for has been the resource you already have.

You have His Spirit. Right now, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a house with a list on a phone. That stands written, and He is the one who supplies what any obedience requires, and He has never once been held back by a town's condition.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches on either side and I am not going to put you in one.

Nothing here says wanting God to move is immature or that you should settle down and stop asking. Ask. Keep asking. That hunger is right and Scripture is full of people who would not stop asking, and His Spirit is the one who put it in you.

And nothing here promises that the whistle blows. I cannot promise that and I will not try. Nobody arranges a move of God and nobody earns one, and nine quiet years are not a report on you or on your praying or on your town, and Scripture never once makes it anybody's fault.

Here is the tender part. The waiting has not been laziness and it has not been unbelief either. It has been reverence pointed slightly wrong.

You have been treating the ordinary things as too small to do until the significant thing begins, and that is not humility, it is a category error, and it has cost you nine years of afternoons.

Scripture puts the power in His Spirit and not in circumstances, and His Spirit is in you today, and neither of them has ever asked you to wait for better conditions before ringing a woman from a course.