I Stopped When I Saw How Long

The woman who told her was being kind. That is the thing Priya keeps coming back to.

It was a coffee in a station café, and Priya had described the thing she wanted to do, all of it, in one long enthusiastic run that lasted about four minutes, and the woman had listened properly and had not laughed once and had asked two very good questions.

And then she had said, gently, you know that is a fifteen year thing, don't you.

Not to discourage her. She meant it as respect. She was saying this is real and it is worth doing and I am not going to insult you by pretending it is quick.

Priya said something like oh, yes, no, of course, and they talked about something else, and she got the 4:41 home.

That was three years ago.

She has not done nothing since. She has done the sort of nothing that looks busy. She has read about it. She has had two conversations. She has a folder. She has, on three separate occasions, made a start on the first proper piece of it and abandoned it before the end of the week.

And when she tries to work out what happened at that station table, it is not discouragement and it is not doubt. She still believes in the thing entirely. She would still argue for it.

It is that fifteen years arrived in her head as a single object, all at once, and she has been trying to lift the whole of it ever since.

She has never once tried to lift a Tuesday of it. She has been standing in front of fifteen years, testing the weight, going away, coming back, testing the weight again.

And underneath that there is something quieter, which she only said out loud to herself in June. She is thirty-four. Fifteen years puts her at forty-nine, and a version of her that she does not want to meet has been whispering that if she starts and it does not work, she will have spent the good part of her life on it and have nothing to show.

So she has been protecting herself by not starting, and calling that being sensible.

And you may know that exact table, and yours may have been a number somebody said, or a number you worked out yourself in the car afterwards.

The picture Scripture uses is a farmer, and a farmer never lifts the year

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have carried it since that station and it was never yours.

You are not being asked to carry fifteen years. You never were. Scripture never once hands anybody a season as a single weight, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your capacity for the whole thing, who holds a person across long time. Set that down at this table. It is heavy, which is precisely the point, and nobody was ever meant to pick it up in one piece.

Now hear the picture the letter reaches for, because it is deliberately agricultural.

See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains.James 5:7

Watch what the farmer is actually doing, because the verse is quite specific.

He is waiting. And while he waits, he is farming. He is not sitting on a gate contemplating the harvest as one object. He is doing today's job, which is a small job, and then tomorrow's, which is another small one.

He also does not control the rains. That is stated right there. The autumn and the spring rains are simply going to do what they do, and his part is the ground in front of him and the season is God's.

You have that arrangement. Right now, at thirty-four, with a folder and three abandoned starts. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who sustains a person across years, and He has never once required somebody to be able to hold the whole span at once.

Now here is the part I want to place carefully, because it is where it turns.

There were people who worked forty years on one wrong, and I want you to notice something about them that is almost never mentioned. Most of them did not know at the start that it would be forty. If they had been told at the first meeting, several of them would have gone home.

And the ones who lasted did not spend those decades holding the forty years in their heads. They held Thursday. They held the next piece of work. They held the meeting that was coming up, and the letter that needed writing, and the person they had promised to see.

Forty years is the shape it turned out to have when it was over. It was never the load anybody carried.

Scripture puts a farmer in the sentence and puts the rains in God's hands, and His Spirit is the one who supplies what a long season needs, and none of that asks you to be able to imagine the end of it.

And I will say the honest half, gently. What that kind woman gave you at the station was a fact, and facts are useful. What you did with it was turn it into a weight and then decide you could not lift it, and that part was not her doing and it was not the fact's fault either.