He Is Not Timing You

Twenty to six in the morning, one lamp on over the counter, and the tea is too hot to drink yet.

The Bible is open in front of her at the place it is always open. She knows the page by the shape of it, by the coffee ring in the top corner from a morning three winters ago. The ribbon lies across it, green, frayed at the end where she has worried it with her thumb, and the ribbon has been in the same third of the book for four years.

Four Januaries. Four fresh starts. The first year she got as far as the wilderness and the numbers and stopped. The second year she made it further and then February happened, the way February happens. Last year she did not even take the ribbon out.

On her phone there is an app that keeps count, and she does not open it anymore, but she knows what it says when she does. It tells her, in a small gray sentence, exactly how many days behind she is. Thirty four, last time. It says it politely. It offers to help her catch up.

That is the word she cannot get out from under. Behind.

Because it is not only the reading. It is the prayer that went quiet somewhere in her thirties and never quite came back. It is the temper with her eldest that she has confessed so many times she has begun to feel like a person filing the same form at the same window with the same clerk, who must, by now, recognize her. It is the woman two rows in front on Sunday who talks about what God said to her this week the way you would talk about the weather, easily, and how that used to make her hungry and now just makes her tired.

She has decided something about herself. She has not said it out loud, but she has decided it, and she lives out of it every morning at this counter. She has decided that God has been very patient with her, and that his patience has an expression on its face now.

You have a ribbon too.

It might be an actual one. It might be the same three sins you keep bringing back, or the letter you never sent, or the version of yourself you promised him you would be by now and are visibly not. Whatever it is, you have a marker somewhere in your life that has not moved, and you check it, and every time you check it you learn the same thing about yourself again.

And somewhere along the way you stopped picturing God as somebody who is with you and started picturing him as somebody who is waiting on you. Arms folded. Patient, yes. Kind, probably. But waiting, and glancing down, and quietly aware of how long this is taking.

That picture is the thing that is actually exhausting you. Not the pace. The picture.

Nobody put a stopwatch in his hand

I am not going to argue you out of this, and I would not want to. Nobody has ever been talked out of shame by a better argument. You have already heard the arguments. You have made most of them to yourself at that counter, and they last about as long as it takes to open the app.

So instead of arguing, I want to put you in front of a description of him and let you be looked at for a minute. It is written at Isaiah 42:3, and by His Spirit an old line of poetry becomes somebody actually looking at you across that counter at twenty to six.

Isaiah is describing God's Servant, and he tells us how you will know him when he comes. Not by volume. Not by the crowd he pulls. By what he does with the things that are nearly finished.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.Isaiah 42:3

Hold those two objects, because they are chosen with terrible precision.

A bruised reed is a reed that has been stepped on. Reeds were cut for pipes, for measuring, for writing. A bruised one will not sound a clean note and will not measure straight. It is not broken, which is almost worse, because a broken one you throw away without thinking. A bruised one you look at, and you weigh it, and you snap it, because it is easier to cut a new reed than to trust one that failed you once.

A wick with no flame left, only smoke, is the same problem in a different room. It is not giving light. It is giving smell. Anybody at all would pinch it out.

And the sentence says he does not. Not that he will get around to fixing it. That is not the promise. The promise is about what his hands do not do. He does not snap. He does not pinch it out. He carries the reed that will not play a clean note, and he shields the wick that is only smoking, and he does it while it is still bruised and still smoking, which is exactly when everyone else has already reached for a replacement.

Now hear what is underneath that. If God dealt with slow progress by discarding, he would have needed a description of a completely different kind, and Isaiah would have written it. Instead the mark of the Servant, the thing he is famous for in heaven, is that he does not use his strength on the barely alive.

He is not standing over your life with a stopwatch. Nobody put a stopwatch in his hand. You put it there, in your imagination, at some point you probably could not date, and you have been reading his face by a device he has never once held. His Spirit does not keep time for you either. He keeps company with you, which is the job Isaiah 42:3 actually describes and the only one He has ever taken.

And here is the part that undoes the whole shame, if you will let it. That verse does not end with the reed. It ends with justice arriving. Faithfully. Certainly. The Servant who refuses to snap the reed is the same Servant who finishes what he was sent to do, and the two things are not in tension. His gentleness with what is slow has never slowed him down. Your pace is not putting his purposes at risk. You are not the delay in anybody's plan.