Whether The Whole Thirty Years Was A Mistake

The thought about stopping came first, and it came in March, and he handled it about as well as a man can handle a thing like that.

He did not act on it. He did not tell anybody. He noticed it, and he thought, well, I am sixty-one and I am tired, and men get tired, and it will pass.

What he was not ready for is what it did next.

It went backwards.

Because at some point in the summer, standing at a gate, it stopped being a question about this year and turned into a question about a young man in 1994 who stood up in a room and said he believed God had put a hand on him.

And the question was: did He?

And once that question is in the field, it goes everywhere. The building they took on in 2003. The eleven years he was somewhere he now suspects he stayed too long in. The thing he said to a couple in a kitchen in 2011 with a great deal of confidence, which he now cannot remember the grounds for.

It is not that he thinks it was all wasted. It is worse and quieter than that. It is that he is no longer certain there was ever anything there to begin with, and if there was not, then thirty years of a man's one life were a thing he talked himself into at twenty-six and then defended.

He has not said this to his wife. She was in the room in 1994. That is exactly why he has not said it.

So he stands at the gate in the afternoons more than he used to, and the stubble goes off toward the trees the way it does every year, and he thinks about a man of twenty-six who was so sure, and he cannot decide whether he is looking at somebody brave or somebody who was simply young.

Now that is you at the gate, and you knew it was you by the second paragraph, because it is a thing men our age do not say out loud.

Two different questions, and only one of them is yours

Let me say what is not about to happen, because you have braced for both of them.

Nobody here is going to talk you into staying. Not by encouragement, not by guilt, not by a story about a man who nearly walked away and weeps about it now. And nobody here is going to tell you to go. That is not mine to hand you. I do not know your ground or your years, and both of those are only different ways of making a worn out man carry a decision on a Tuesday afternoon.

There is no decision on this page. Set it down for twenty minutes. It will keep.

There is nothing to do here either. No practice to sharpen, no discipline to add, nothing to get up earlier for. You are running on empty, and a suggestion is the last thing empty needs.

What I want to do is separate two questions that got welded together at that gate, because you have been trying to answer one of them and it is not the one you actually have.

The question you have is: I am tired, and I have wondered about stopping.

The question you have been answering is: was I ever called at all.

Those are not the same question, and the second one only turned up because the first one had nowhere to go. Tiredness does that. It does not stay where you put it. Left alone long enough with no other voice in the field, it starts going through your papers.

Your tiredness in March has no authority over a room in 1994, and it never once had the standing to reopen it. It is written that the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29), and irrevocable means He does not take it back, not on a hard year and not on a bad afternoon. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out to a gate and sets it down beside a man in a cap.

Now look at somebody who said it much harder than you have, to God's face, in the middle of doing the work.

There was a man leading an enormous number of people through a wilderness, and it went wrong, and he came to God and said this: I am not able to carry all this people alone, the burden is too heavy for me. And then he said, if you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight (Numbers 11:14-15).

That is what he said. Out loud. To God. About the job God gave him.

And read what came back, because there is not a word of rebuke in it.

God did not say, you disappoint me. God did not say, I chose the wrong man. God did not say, that talk means you were never called. He said, gather seventy men, and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them, so that you shall not bear it yourself alone (Numbers 11:16-17).

The answer to a man saying it is too heavy was: yes, it is, and I never asked you to carry it by yourself.

God has never treated a man's exhaustion as evidence against his calling, and He is not starting with yours. He did not withdraw one thing from Moses over that speech, and the man carried the same work for decades afterwards. His Spirit is what turns a wilderness conversation into something that speaks in a stubble field in the autumn.

And there is a thing to say about the young man in 1994, because he cannot defend himself and you have him on trial.

You are not judging him on the evidence. You are judging him with a jury of one, at sixty-one, at the end of a hard eighteen months, on an afternoon when you had nothing left. He is not being tried. He is being sentenced by a tired man who has forgotten what it cost him to stand up in that room.

A calling is not proved or disproved by how it feels in the thirtieth year, because it never rested on how it felt in the first one. It is written that God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do (Hebrews 6:10), and still do is in that sentence for men exactly your age. His Spirit is the one who reads that over thirty years rather than over a mood.

And I need to say this plainly, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If any of this has gone further than tiredness, if you have found yourself thinking that everyone would manage better without you in the world at all, please tell a human being today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one person who knows your name and will sit with you for as long as it takes. Being the man everyone else rings does not disqualify you from ringing somebody.