Twenty Years With the Same Page

It is a sheet of A4, folded three times, and the fold lines have gone soft the way paper does when it has been opened a lot.

You were twenty-three. You wrote it in a notebook first and then copied it onto a clean sheet because it felt like the kind of thing that should be on a clean sheet, and you dated it, which is the detail you regret most and are also glad about.

Twenty years.

You have not shown it to anybody in about twelve of those. There was a stretch in your late twenties when you would mention it, and people were encouraging in a way that made you stop mentioning it, because there is a particular warmth people use for a young man's certainty that they do not use for a middle-aged man's.

Nothing on that page has happened. Not partly. Not in a form you could argue for at a stretch. There is no chart on which twenty years shows any movement at all.

You still have it. It is in the same envelope in the same drawer. You do not read it often, and you know where every fold is.

And the question that arrives now, at forty-three, at about two in the morning, is not whether it will happen.

It is whether you have spent twenty years being faithful to something you made up when you were young.

God builds the delay into the instruction

There is a passage in Habakkuk where God answers a man who has been complaining, and the answer is about writing and waiting.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.Habakkuk 2:2-3

Two things in that.

First, God tells him to write it down. That is not incidental. Something is put on a physical page precisely because a person will need it later and their memory will not be trustworthy under twenty years of nothing.

Second, and this is the part almost nobody notices: God says though it tarry. He builds the delay into the instruction. He does not say if it tarries. He tells the man in advance that waiting is going to be the shape of this, and He tells him to wait anyway.

You have been doing precisely what that man was told to do. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says though it tarry, wait for it, Habakkuk 2:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hold a folded sheet at forty-three without it turning into either a fantasy or a wound.

Twenty years is not evidence

Here is the reasoning that arrives at two in the morning, and it needs looking at directly.

It runs: if this were from God, something would have shown by now. Nothing has shown. Therefore I made it up at twenty-three.

Every step of that assumes a timetable that nobody was ever given.

Abraham is given a promise about descendants and is a hundred years old before anything visible occurs. Joseph has the dream at seventeen and the meaning of it arrives at about thirty-nine. The prophets speak about a Messiah across centuries and none of them are standing there when He comes.

If twenty years of no visible movement disqualified a word from God, most of Scripture would be a record of mistakes.

You are not looking at evidence, you are looking at duration. Scripture says at the end it shall speak, and not lie, Habakkuk 2:3, and the Holy Spirit does not go quiet on a promise because a decade passes without a headline.

And I am not going to tell you it is real

That has to be said plainly, and it is the honest half of this page.

I do not know what is on that sheet. I do not know whether a young man heard God, or heard his own ambition, or heard some of both, which is the most common thing and the one nobody ever says out loud.

Anybody who tells you confidently, in either direction, is guessing.

But here is what does not depend on that. Twenty years of holding something before God, of not letting it curdle into bitterness, of not making it a demand, of getting up and working and loving your people while a folded page sat in a drawer, is not wasted whatever turns out to be on it.

You have not lost anything by holding it, and you are not being assessed on whether you were right at twenty-three. Scripture says the Lord is good unto them that wait for Him, Lamentations 3:25, and the Holy Spirit does not grade a man on his own hearing before He will keep him.

What to do with the page

One practical thing, and it is smaller than you expect. Scripture told a man to write it down precisely so it could be read later, Habakkuk 2:2, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it readable in a drawer.

Take it out and read it. Not to test it. Read it as a document written by a twenty-three year old you are fond of.

You may find that some of it was ambition and some of it was God and that you can now, at forty-three, tell the difference in a way you could not at twenty-eight. That is not a demolition. That is twenty years of knowing God better, applied to a page.

And whatever survives that reading, put it back in the drawer and stop treating it as a case you have to defend.

You are free to hold it loosely without dropping it. Scripture says commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established, Proverbs 16:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the establishing rather than requiring you to keep the whole thing standing by force.