Everything Was a Stage On the Way

Rebekah counted them in a notebook on a train, which is a foolish thing to do and she does not recommend it.

She counted the number of times something in her life had been described to her, by somebody kind, as a stage.

The first flat was a stepping stone. The first job was foundational. The two years after that were a season. The role she is in now, which she has been in for four years and is good at, was described by a manager she likes as a great platform. The city she lives in is where she is for now. The church she goes to is one she is happy at for this season, which is a phrase somebody used about it to her, and she has caught herself using it since.

She got to eleven and put the notebook away.

She is not unhappy. Everybody in this article's audience is going to assume that and it is not the case. She likes her life. She would tell you so and mean it.

It is that she is thirty-eight and she does not have a single thing that anybody, including herself, has ever described in the present tense as simply hers. Everything is on the way somewhere. It has been on the way somewhere for eleven identifiable instances and probably more, and she has no idea when the arriving is scheduled or what it would look like.

What got her was the woman who runs the coffee stand at the station she uses, who has run it for nine years and knows what Rebekah orders. She said, one Thursday, while doing four things at once: I love this. People ask when I am going to do something else and I say what, and stop doing this?

What, and stop doing this?

Rebekah stood on a platform with a cup in her hand and had to look at the departure board for a minute, and she could not have explained it to a single person she works with.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with her job.

She thought: that woman is standing in her life and I have been standing on a path through mine for eleven years, and nobody ever told me I was allowed to arrive.

Say the word properly, before anything else

I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman standing on a platform holding a cup.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a platform, not a stepping stone. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and this is the category where that has to stop being an idea and become an answer.

And let me be plain about ambition before we go further. There is nothing wrong with going somewhere. Nothing here tells you to stay in the role or leave the role or settle for anything. If you are genuinely short, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to look at the word stage, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what eleven of them have done.

The path, the presence, and the fullness

Psalm sixteen ends with three things in one verse, and the second and third of them are not scheduled.

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.Psalm 16:11

I am not going to improve on that, and I would not know how.

But notice the shape of it, because that is what a woman on a platform needs. There is a path. He does not pretend otherwise, and He is the one who makes it known, which means going somewhere is not being argued against here.

And then, without waiting for the path to be finished, the psalm puts fullness in the present tense. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Not there will be. Not once you arrive. There is, and the location is a Presence rather than a destination, which means it is available at any point on any path including a station platform at ten past eight.

You are not restless and you are not ungrateful. You are somebody who has had eleven good things correctly described as preparation, by kind people, none of whom were wrong, and the written word does not scold anybody for what that does over a decade. It puts fullness in the present tense on a path that is still running, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a verse and being able to arrive.

And here is what is true of you today, before one thing about the role or the city or the church is decided. You have a portion and it is not scheduled. His word says in your presence there is fullness of joy, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a line at the end of a psalm.

What eleven stages did

Think about what got you on that platform. It wasn't the woman's contentment. You have met contented people and they have never once undone you.

It was: what, and stop doing this? It was somebody who had never been given the word stage, standing inside her own life with both feet, saying so cheerfully, while making four coffees. You were starving to be told you were allowed to arrive, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as a lack of drive, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the notebook. It is not that any single one of those descriptions was wrong. It is that eleven of them stacked up, over eleven years, into a quiet operating rule that nothing you are currently holding is the thing, and no promotion and no move will fix that, because the rule will simply be applied to the next one.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The fullness is located in a Presence and not at the end of anything. Jesus told His friends that His joy was in them right there, in the middle of an evening that was about to go very badly, and He was on that platform before the coffee was handed over.