The Window I Thought Shut at Thirty

The table is a trestle table with a cloth on it that does not quite reach the ends, and it is in the same spot in the church hall every week, between the coffee urn and the door to the parking lot.

There are four clipboards and a jar of pens. Deb sits behind it with her cardigan over the back of her chair and a way of catching your eye that is not pushy and is completely effective. Food pantry, Saturday mornings. The bus team. Nursery, second service. Hospitality, which mostly means the urn.

She has walked past that table every Sunday for two years and she has picked up a pen four times.

Four. She counted, which tells you something.

The first time she got as far as writing the first letter of her name on the hospitality sheet and then put the pen back in the jar and said something bright to Deb about needing to check her schedule, and walked out to the parking lot and sat in her car for eleven minutes.

Here is what is actually in the way, and it is not laziness and it is not humility.

At nineteen she had a plan and the plan had a date on it. Language school by twenty two. Sent by twenty five. She had the map on her wall and the name of a city on a card in her wallet and a whole church that prayed over her at a Sunday evening service with everyone's hands out. She was not vague about it. She was the least vague person in that room.

Then she got sick. Not spectacularly. Slowly, and then thoroughly, and then for a long time, in a way that took four specialists and most of a decade to even name properly. Twenty two went by in a bedroom. Twenty five went by. She got a little better at twenty nine and a little worse at thirty one and now, at thirty six, she has two reliably good days a week and she plans her life around them like a woman doing logistics for someone else.

And somewhere in there, without a conversation and without a moment, she filed herself. That is the only word for it. Not a crisis, not a renunciation, no dramatic evening of shaking a fist at the ceiling. An administrative act. She put herself in a drawer labeled too late and she closed the drawer and she has been walking past a trestle table ever since.

The window was my twenties. That is the sentence, and she has never said it out loud to a human being, because saying it would require somebody to argue with her, and she does not want to be argued with. She wants to be right about it so it stops hurting.

You have your own drawer. Maybe it is a mission field, and maybe it is medical school, a business, a family, a stage, a thing you were sure you were for before something took the years you had earmarked for it. And you did not renounce it. You filed it. You have been walking past your own trestle table with a pleasant expression on your face for years. You are His workmanship, and that is present tense, and the illness did not amend it. It is written in Ephesians 2:10 that the good works were prepared beforehand for us to walk in, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept every one of them intact through the entire decade you spent in a bedroom.

Prepared beforehand, and prepared for whom

Paul writes one sentence to the Ephesians that quietly demolishes the drawer, and it is famous enough that you have probably stopped hearing it.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

Take it in pieces, slowly, because the pieces are where it lives.

Workmanship. Not worker. The thing being made is you, and the making is His, and that is stated before a single work is mentioned.

Prepared beforehand. Not prepared in response to your resume. Not prepared for the version of you that hit its milestones. Prepared before, which means prepared without reference to how your twenties turned out, by Someone who was not surprised by any of it.

That we should walk in them. Walk. Not sprint, not seize, not catch before the door closes. There is no verse anywhere in the New Testament about a window, and there is no verse about being sent by twenty five. That was a plan and it was a good plan and it was yours, and it is not what Ephesians 2:10 is describing.

You are His workmanship, and the works with your name on them were prepared before you had a plan to miss. That is Ephesians 2:10 in the written word and not my encouragement, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been holding them, unassigned to anybody else, through every year you were filing yourself away.

Usefulness is not the proof of anything

Now the careful part, and I want to be plain because this is exactly the ground where a page like this one usually does damage.

I am not telling you that if you sign the sheet you will be restored. Serving is not the evidence. Nothing you do at that table proves anything about what God has done in you, and a person who cannot do anything at that table is not less restored than the woman on the bus team. If usefulness were the proof, the sickest people in your church would be the least loved by God, and you already know that is monstrous.

Restored is not the same word as replaced, either. Replaced would hand you back your twenties, the map on the wall, the card in the wallet, the plane. Restored puts back into the person what was taken out of the person, and Peter says the God of all grace will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you (1 Peter 5:10), with every verb aimed at you rather than at your itinerary.

And I am not going to write to you as though two good days a week were an attitude problem. Your capacity is what it is. It is a real number and it is not a moral failure and no amount of resolve is going to renegotiate it this afternoon. The works prepared beforehand were prepared with that number known. He did not draft them for a body you do not have.

You have work in front of you that was measured for the life you are actually living. His word says the works were prepared beforehand for us to walk in, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the leading into them, at a pace that fits two good days rather than five, without one word of complaint about the arithmetic.