We Got the Contract

Danielle read the email four times on the Thursday and the fourth time she was not reading it, she was looking for the sentence that took it back.

It is the biggest thing that has happened to that company. Three years of tendering and being politely declined and one occasion that she is not going to describe where somebody said something to her at a networking evening that she has thought about at least once a month since.

The contract is real. It is signed. It means three people get contracts of their own instead of the arrangement they have been on, and it means she can stop doing the accounts at eleven at night, and it means her mother, who did not understand what Danielle does and was quietly worried for six years, has stopped being quietly worried.

She has not celebrated it properly. That is the thing she has noticed about herself.

There was a dinner. She went and she was good at it. And she has, since the Thursday, been carrying a specific and constant expectation, which is that at some point in the next few months somebody in one of those rooms is going to look at her slightly too long and work out that she should not be there.

She could not tell you what they would work out. That is the part she has stopped being able to argue with. There is nothing to find. The work is good and the pricing was honest and she has the qualifications twice over.

What got her was her mother, of all people, who does not do this sort of conversation. Danielle was at her house, and her mother said, from the sink, in the middle of something else entirely: I never worried you could not do it. I worried nobody would let you in the room. There is a difference and I never said it because I did not want to put it in your head.

I never worried you could not do it.

Danielle sat at her mother's kitchen table and could not answer, and she could not have explained it to one person in that industry.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the contract.

She thought: the thing I have been waiting to be found out for is not a lack of ability, and I have known that the whole time, and what I have actually been waiting for is somebody to take the room back off me.

Let me say the word properly

Before we go on 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 reading the same email a fourth time.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a signed contract, not three years of tendering finally landing. 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 let me be plain about something else before we go further. Nothing on this page suggests the contract was a lesser gift or that you should be less pleased about it. Three people are on proper contracts because of what you did. That was a real answer to a real problem and it worked, and I am glad of it and so is God.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name the thing that did not change on the Thursday, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You have been inside this the whole time. Scripture says so, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that more than information.

Accepted, and the decision is older than the room

Paul writes one sentence at the start of Ephesians about how a person comes to belong, and the timing in it is the whole point.

He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.Ephesians 1:5-6

Read the word adoption and then read the word purpose, and then notice when it all happened.

Adoption is a legal word and it is a deliberate one. Nobody is adopted by accident and nobody is adopted on probation. It is a decision, made by somebody with the standing to make it, and once it is made the child's position in that house does not depend on the child's performance in it.

And this adoption was decided according to the purpose of his will, which is language about intention rather than about assessment. It was not a response to anything anybody did in a room.

Then the last phrase, which is the one to carry: blessed us in the Beloved. Not blessed us on the strength of our tender. In Him. The acceptance is located in Somebody else and it was settled before you got there.

You are not fragile for the constant expectation. You are somebody who was told something at a networking evening and has been braced ever since, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It dates the decision, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a verse and being able to sit in a room without checking the door.

And here is what is true of you today, before one thing about that industry changes. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says He has blessed us in the Beloved, in the perfect tense, done, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a doctrine in a letter.

What the contract did not change

Think about what got you at that table. It wasn't encouragement. Your mother has never gone in for encouragement.

It was: I never worried you could not do it, I worried nobody would let you in the room. It was somebody who has been watching you for six years naming the actual fear with complete precision, and admitting she had held it back on purpose. You were starving to have it named rather than argued with, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as insecurity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the fourth reading of the email. It was never a doubt about the work. It is that you have understood, for a long time and without saying it, that being in the room is granted by people and can be withdrawn by people, and no contract on earth can settle that, which is not a failure of the contract.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Your standing was not granted by anybody in that industry and it cannot be withdrawn by them. Jesus deliberately put Himself in rooms where He was not welcome and called people out of crowds who had been kept at the edges of them, and He was in that kitchen while the sink was running.