The Eleventh Time It Failed

It is day four and he is magnificent.

He got up before the alarm. He has told four people about it, including one he does not like, which is how you know it is serious. He has bought the thing you buy. He has a folder. He has explained the whole plan to his wife twice, once in the kitchen and once, at greater length, at eleven o'clock at night when she was trying to sleep, and she said the right things and meant them.

And he means it. That is what nobody understands about him and what he cannot make anybody believe. He is not performing. He genuinely cares about this, he has cared about it for years, it keeps him awake, it is one of the two or three things he would say his life is actually for.

Day four is real.

But somewhere under all of it, in a cold quiet room at the back of him that he does not go into, he already knows the shape of what is coming, because he has been here before, and it is not failure that is coming.

It is Tuesday the eleventh of next month.

Nothing will happen on that Tuesday. That is the whole problem. There will be no crisis, no dramatic collapse, nobody will let him down and nothing will go wrong. He will simply wake up and it will not feel like anything any more, and there will be a small hard piece of admin to do, and he will not do it, and he will not do it the next day either.

By March the folder is in the drawer with the other folders.

He is not afraid of failing. He is used to failing. He is afraid of the Tuesday when it stops feeling like anything.

Endurance was never a feeling

Let me take one thing off you before anything else, because you have carried it since you were about nineteen. Scripture never once laid it on you, and His Spirit has not been asking for it.

The fade is not a character defect.

You have concluded that other people have some substance you were issued a smaller portion of, and that the evidence is the drawer full of folders. It is not. Enthusiasm is a fuel, it burns hot, it burns fast, and it runs out in every human being who has ever lived, including all the ones you admire. Nobody, anywhere, has stayed with a long thing because the feeling lasted. The feeling never lasts. It was never designed to. Scripture never puts the weight there, and His Spirit is what actually sustains a long work.

So what you actually need is not more fire. You have plenty of fire. You need to know what people do on the eleventh of the month.

And let us not become weary in doing good, for in the proper season we will reap, if we do not give up.Galatians 6:9

Notice who Paul is writing to. Not to people who never started. To people who did start, who are in it, and who are tired. He assumes the tiredness. It is in the sentence as a normal condition of doing good over time, not as a sign that something has gone wrong with them.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say get your passion back. He does not say remember how you felt at the beginning. He says the proper season is not the same as the season you are in, and that the one thing you are asked for is to not give up in the gap between the two. That is what stands written, and His Spirit is the one who holds a person inside that gap.

That is a much smaller ask than the one you have been failing. You have been trying to sustain a feeling. You were only ever asked to keep showing up.

Now let me hand you something out of your own family history, because the word on the door of this house is good news, and the people who carried that word hardest are worth looking at properly rather than as a poster.

There was a man who brought a bill to abolish the slave trade, and it was defeated. So he brought it again the following session, and it was defeated. And again. He did that for the better part of twenty years, through failure after failure, while being mocked, while being ill, while everybody sensible explained that the thing was simply not achievable. The trade was abolished in the end. And slavery itself was not ended in law until decades further on, days before he died.

Forty years and change, on one thing, most of it losing.

Here is what I want you to see about him, and it is not the willpower, because the willpower is exactly the story you have been beaten with. Scripture does not put it there either, and His Spirit is what carried him.

He did not do it alone and he did not do it on feeling. There was a village, and a group of friends who lived near each other and met constantly, in and out of each other's houses, doing the unglamorous work in company: the letters, the evidence, the committees, the long boring years. That is what carried him past his own Tuesdays. Endurance is almost never a private virtue. It is a room with the same people in it, meeting again after the eleventh defeat, setting the table for the twelfth attempt.

And I am not going to tell you what your long thing should be. I am not naming a cause and I am not sending you anywhere. You already have one, and you thought of it in paragraph two, and it is not my business to replace it with mine.