On Purpose, Or On Repeat

Sandrine teaches, and teachers cannot leave a thing alone once they have seen it, and what she saw was two columns where she had expected one.

She had opened her statement to settle a question with a supplier. That was all. But she is the sort of woman who cannot look at a list without sorting it, and about halfway down she found herself doing something she had not set out to do, which was putting a small mark beside every line she had actually chosen this year.

Not chosen once, at some point in the past. Chosen this year. Decided on, deliberately, by the woman she is now, with the life she currently has.

She went down the whole page.

And when she got to the bottom she counted the marks, and there were four.

The rest of it, every other line, was running. Not wrong. Not wasteful. Running. Set up at some point by a version of her with a slightly different life, and never revisited, because nothing had gone wrong and nothing had prompted it and nobody sends you a letter asking whether you would still like to be the person you were in a previous season.

She sat back and said, to the empty classroom, "Well now."

Because here is the thing Sandrine saw, and it is worth seeing.

A repeating line does not lie to you. It is not deceitful. But it is a decision that a person made once and that keeps voting on their behalf every month afterwards, and it will go on voting long after the person has changed their mind, and it does not check in.

That is how a page ends up describing a woman who no longer exists.

Now hear me, because right here is where a teacher starts marking her own work in red, and I am not having that in this room.

Sandrine has not been asleep at the wheel. Nothing on that page is a scandal. She works hard, she is careful, she has never once been in trouble with any of it, and if you handed the page to an accountant he would hand it back and say it looks fine.

That is exactly the point. It looks fine. Fine is not the same as chosen, and a great many of us are living inside arrangements that are perfectly fine and were selected by somebody we no longer are.

You have your own version. You could go down your own page tonight and put a mark by everything you actively decided this year, and you already have a rough feeling about how many marks there would be, and that feeling is the reason your stomach just did something.

Nobody is calling you passive. You may be the busiest person you know.

You have simply been outvoted, quietly, month after month, by decisions you made in a life you have already left.

Choosing is a command, which means it is available

There is a moment near the end of Deuteronomy where the whole thing comes down to one verb.

I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.Deuteronomy 30:19

Choose. It is a command, and here is the thing about a command in Scripture that people miss: God does not command what He does not enable. He does not stand over anybody demanding a thing they have no capacity for. A command in the mouth of God is a door He has already opened, worded as an instruction.

So hear it. You are able to choose today. That is not encouragement and it is not positive thinking: the written word puts the choosing in the imperative, which means the capacity is already given, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that live in a woman sitting in an empty classroom rather than leaving it a fine idea in a book.

And nothing on that page has authority over you. A standing arrangement is not a covenant and it is not a vow. Scripture knows the difference between a vow before God and an arrangement with a company, and the Spirit of truth is not going to let a repeating line pretend to be the first when it is only ever the second.

Now, the verse about treasure, and hear the direction of it, because near everybody runs it backwards. Where the treasure is, there the heart will be also. The treasure first. The heart follows it and settles.

Which is doctrine you can dance to, and it means this: you are not required to feel differently before anything can move. That is the order the word puts it in, and the Holy Spirit set it that way because a woman at the end of a teaching day has nothing left to feel with, and He knew that when He inspired it.

You move one thing on purpose. The heart comes along after, and it does not need to be persuaded.

Fine is not the same as chosen

I will not tell you what to do with a single figure on that page. Not an amount, not a proportion, not one word of instruction, because I do not know your life and it is not mine to say, and the moment I said it you would be taking money advice out of a message about your own soul.

What I am telling you is that there are two kinds of line and they look identical.

One of them is a decision. The other is an echo of a decision. They cost the same, they arrive on the same day, they appear in the same column, and only you can tell them apart, and only by looking.

And a woman who has looked has already done the hard part. You are not going to be condemned for what the page says. The word is plain that there is now no condemnation for those in Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a body, so a person can read their own page with their shoulders down. Conviction shows you a thing and hands you a door. Condemnation shows you a thing and walks off. If what came up off that column was despair, it was not from Him.