Category: Reflection · 3 min read

Before the door opens, something shifts in you. The seasons that feel like waiting are often the seasons where the deepest work is being done — quietly, internally, in the parts of you no one else can see.

There is a particular kind of quiet that comes after you say yes.

Not the yes you announce. The private one. The one that happened in the car, or at three in the morning, or standing at the sink — where something in you finally stopped arguing and said, alright. I'm willing.

You expect something to happen next.

And then Monday comes. Same drive. Same inbox. Same people needing the same things from you at the same hour they always need them. Nothing outward has moved at all.

So you start to wonder whether you imagined the whole thing.

Here is what I've come to believe about that stretch of road: it isn't the delay before the thing. It is the thing.

Samuel anoints David in front of his entire family — oil running down, brothers watching, the youngest one chosen (1 Samuel 16:13). And the very next thing that happens is that David goes back to the sheep. Not to a throne. To the field, the same animals, the same chores he had the week before. Years pass that way.

Moses knew at forty what he was supposed to be for. He acted on it in his own strength, and badly, and ended up on the back side of the desert keeping a flock that wasn't even his (Exodus 2:11–15; 3:1). Forty more years out there. The bush didn't burn until he had been in that field long enough to stop being the man who thought he could handle it himself.

Neither of them was being stored. They were being changed.

Something has to come out of you before you can carry what's coming. The need to be seen doing it. The impulse to force the timing. The version of yourself that would have used the assignment to prove something to somebody. That doesn't leave in a single moment of decision. It leaves slowly, in ordinary weeks where nobody is watching and there is nothing to prove.

And something has to go in. The steadiness. The patience. The particular kind of trust that only grows in a person who has had to keep going without evidence.

I'm not going to tell you that makes the waiting feel better. It doesn't. From the inside, formation never feels like formation. It feels like being passed over. It feels like everyone else got sent and you got left with the sheep.

If that's where you are, I'm not going to rush you out of it.

But I'd ask you to hold one thing while you're there. Work you cannot see is not the same as no work. The most important things happening in you right now are almost certainly not the things you'd list if somebody asked what you'd been up to lately.

The field is not a demotion. It's where the shepherd learned what the king was going to need.

So keep going. Do the ordinary week. Keep the yes even when nothing appears to be coming of it.

Something is being made ready.

It's probably you.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

What God Does Before He Sends You

Category: Reflection · 3 min read

A Record of Where God Met You