The One Who Does Not Stick at Anything

The pattern is so regular she can plot it, and she has, once, on a piece of paper, and then thrown the paper away.

Two years and eight months. Two years and ten months. Three years and one month. Two years and five months. Four moves, three cities, six jobs, and, the one that actually costs, four churches.

She is thirty two.

It is never dramatic. That is the thing she cannot explain to anybody, including the one friend who has asked properly. There is no falling out. There is no scandal. Somewhere in the third year something goes quiet in her, and she notices it about two months after it starts, and then there is a stretch of about eight weeks where she is deciding without admitting that she is deciding, and then she goes.

She has good reasons every time. The reasons are true. A job that got worse. A landlord. A church that changed. All of it real, and all of it, she is fairly sure, arriving conveniently.

She is sitting on the floor of a half unpacked apartment in a fourth city with three boxes still taped up, and one of the boxes has not been opened in two moves, and she has just noticed that.

And here is the sentence that has been running since about the second move: I do not have that one. Faithfulness. It is on the list, everybody knows it is on the list, and whatever it is in people who stay, she was not issued it.

She has never said this out loud because there is no way to say it that does not sound like fishing. Say it to somebody and they will say kind things about how she has been through a lot and how brave it is to start again, and every one of those sentences will land in the wrong place.

The light in a new apartment on the first evening is always strange because you do not know yet where it comes in.

You have your pattern. It might not be three years. It might be that you do not finish, or that you do not call people back, or that there is a thing you always do at a particular point. And under it is a conclusion about what you were and were not issued. There is a line in Timothy that says something about faithfulness that does not depend on the person at all.

He abides faithful

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is exactly where somebody normally prescribes. Commit to two years. Make a promise to somebody. Set an accountability arrangement. I am not going to do that. Faithfulness is on the list in Galatians as fruit the Spirit grows, and a woman of thirty two who takes it on as a discipline will make a promise she means and will be sitting on a different floor at thirty five having added a broken commitment to the pile.

Paul writes a short thing to Timothy that looks like a hymn, four lines of it, and the fourth line is the one nobody expects. If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13).

Read the structure. If we believe not. Paul grants the worst case, out loud, without qualification. And then the answer to it is not about us at all: yet he abideth faithful.

And then the reason, which is the extraordinary part: he cannot deny himself. His faithfulness is not a response to ours and it is not a reward for it. It is a property of His own nature, and He is not able to act against it.

You have been held by a faithfulness that has nothing to do with your record. That is not me softening the verse; 2 Timothy 2:13 grants the not believing and answers it with His own nature, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter gave the reason as He cannot deny Himself.

And notice the word abideth. He abides faithful. It is the same word this whole site is built on, and here it is being done by Him toward her rather than by her toward anything.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Two years and eight months of staying

Now the pattern, because she has only ever read it one way.

Two years and eight months. Two years and ten months. Three years and one month. She reads that as a list of departures. Read it again as a list of durations.

A woman who has been in four churches for an average of two years and nine months has been in church, continuously, for eleven years. She was there on eleven years of Sundays. She has not stopped believing, she has not stopped going, she has not once been gone for longer than the gap between a leaving and a starting.

That is not the record of somebody who does not stick at anything. It is the record of somebody who keeps starting again in the same direction, four times, which is a harder thing to do than staying and which nobody has ever counted.

You have been faithful in a way your own arithmetic has never scored. Galatians 6:9 says let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not, and fainting is the thing ruled out and moving is not; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has been in four cities with a woman who kept turning up.

This is yours right now, on a floor with three boxes taped: a faithfulness that is His and is not contingent on the pattern. 2 Timothy 2:13 puts the abiding on Him; the Spirit who inspired that line gave the reason as His own nature rather than as a response to a record.

The box that has not been opened in two moves

Let me say something about that box, because it is not a symbol, it is just true and it is worth noticing.

There is a box in the corner that has been carried through two moves unopened. Whatever is in it has not been needed for five years, and it has also not been thrown away, and both of those facts are hers.

That is what this actually looks like from inside: a person carrying things she does not use and cannot discard, from city to city, and being told by everybody that she is brave to start again.

You were never carrying this alone, however many times the boxes went in a van. Deuteronomy 31:8 says the Lord goes before you and will be with you, and the going before happens in every city and does not have to be arranged in advance; the Holy Spirit who carried that promise into the book did not attach it to a length of tenancy.

Fruit is not output, and four cities are where the difference is clearest. Output would be a decade in one place, which is countable and which she does not have. Fruit is what grew on a woman who kept turning up in a new building four times, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the walk you are going to take anyway to work out where anything is in this city, tell Him one true thing with nothing asked for and no commitment attached. Not a promise about how long. One true thing. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that.