Decided At Two, Unmade By Breakfast

Wade knows what he is going to do. He has known, definitively, about three hundred times, always somewhere between one and three in the morning.

It comes with a great deal of clarity. He wakes, or he has not been asleep, and the whole thing arranges itself and he can see exactly what the right course is and he feels almost light about it. Twice he has got up and written it down.

And then it is seven, and the kettle is on, and the notes on the counter look like something a stranger wrote.

Not wrong exactly. Just thin. Overconfident. Missing three obvious things that a person would only miss at two in the morning, and by ten past seven the whole thing has come apart again and he is back where he started.

Eleven months of this.

The maddening part is that he does not know which of the two men is the reliable one. The two o'clock version is decisive but he is also, and Wade is honest enough to admit this, slightly deranged. The seven o'clock version is sensible and he has never once made a decision about anything.

He has begun to think of it as two people who never meet, one of whom can decide and cannot be trusted, one of whom can be trusted and cannot decide.

He is fifty-six. It is not a life-or-death matter. It is just a real one, and it has been sitting in the middle of him for eleven months, and it is starting to affect things that have nothing to do with it.

You may know that kettle.

Maybe your clarity arrives at a particular hour too. Maybe you have written something down in the dark and read it in daylight and not recognized the handwriting.

Which direction the voice comes from

There is a sentence in Isaiah about guidance and it contains one detail that almost everybody reads past.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.Isaiah 30:21

Behind thee.

Not in front. The picture is not of a man standing at a junction being shown a signpost before he moves. It is a man already walking, hearing a correction from behind, because a voice behind you can only reach a person who has already gone past something.

And look at when it comes: when ye turn. Not before. The word arrives at the point of turning, in motion, in real time.

Which is exactly the opposite of what you have been waiting for. You have been waiting to receive the direction and then move. This verse describes a man moving and then receiving the direction.

And the direction you are waiting for comes to somebody who is already walking. The written word puts the voice behind and attaches it to the turning, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has been stationary for eleven months.

And you are not going to be left to wander. The word says thine ears shall hear a word, in the plain future, and the Spirit is the one who does the speaking rather than requiring you to have located it first.

Two men who never meet

Now let me say something about the two of you, because I think the framing has been costing you.

The two o'clock man is not deranged. He is unencumbered. At two in the morning nobody is going to ask you a follow-up question, nothing has to be explained to anybody, and the cost of the decision is not sitting in the room with a face on it. That is why he can decide.

The seven o'clock man is not a coward. He is loaded. He has the kitchen and the day and the people the decision lands on, and every one of those is a real weight and he is right to feel them.

Neither of them is the reliable one. They are the same man carrying different amounts.

And what you have been doing for eleven months is waiting for a version of yourself who has the clarity of two and the load of seven, and that man does not exist and is not coming.

And you are one person and not two, and neither hour is the fraud. The word says the LORD knoweth the thoughts of man, and knoweth them altogether, and the Spirit is the one who holds the whole of a person together when the person cannot.

And you are not required to be unencumbered before you can move. The word puts the voice behind the walker rather than in front of the deliberator, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit in a kitchen at ten past seven.

What the cycle is actually doing

One more thing, and it is practical.

The cycle has become the thing. That is worth saying plainly. Eleven months ago there was a decision; now there is a decision and there is also a nightly ritual about the decision, and the ritual has its own weight and is doing its own damage, and it is not helping.

I am not going to tell you what to decide. I do not know your situation and a stranger who directs a man's life from this distance has done something reckless, and it is not what wisdom is anyway.

What I will say is that eleven months of nightly re-deciding is not deliberation. Deliberation ends.

And nothing about you is under review for having taken eleven months. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has begun to be ashamed of his own kettle.