Holding The Ladder Since I Was Nineteen

Nine of them turned up to paint the hall and by half past eleven there is emulsion on the dust sheets, emulsion on the radiator, and a small argument going on about whether the second coat is really necessary.

He has got both hands on the bottom of the ladder. That is his job and he is good at it, in the sense that the ladder does not move, which is more than could be said for the last three people who tried.

Then something happens that nobody planned. Somebody mentions a name, and the room goes a bit awkward, because everybody knows what has been going on in that family and nobody wants to be the one to say it. And the fellow up the ladder puts his roller down on the tray, and says four sentences, and by the end of them two people are crying and one of them is laughing and the whole hall has turned round.

He hears it from underneath, with his hands still on the stiles and his neck at an angle.

And he thinks, without a scrap of bitterness in it, which somehow makes it worse: I have wanted to be able to do that since I was nineteen years old. I am forty-five. I am not that person and I am never going to be.

Then somebody says the kettle is on, and he lets go of the ladder, and nobody in that hall has the faintest idea that anything happened to him at all.

You know that feeling from the inside. There is something you have wanted since you were young enough not to know better, and you have watched somebody else do it about four hundred times.

The want is honest, and it is not going to be traded

Let us start by refusing the thing that usually happens next, because it is the reason articles like this one leave people flatter than they found them.

The usual move is a swap. You mention the thing, and somebody warmly tells you what God gave you instead, and hands you a word for it, and expects you to be pleased. And you nod, because they meant it kindly, and you go home holding a consolation prize you did not ask for and cannot use.

Nobody here is going to do that. This page will not tell you what God gave you instead. It will not tell you that holding ladders is your calling, or give your years of quiet usefulness a title that turns them into a compartment. And it will not tell you that the thing you long for is on its way, because that is not mine to say and somebody has said it to you before.

The want is honest. Let it be honest. Twenty-six years of wanting something is not a fault in a person; it is usually a sign that they took the whole business seriously from very young.

You are not a compromise God settled for, and He was not short of good material by the time He got to you. That is not a compliment I am paying you. It is what is written about how any of this is handed out at all:

All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.1 Corinthians 12:11

Read that again slowly. Apportions. As He wills. One Spirit, deciding, deliberately, person by person. There is no leftovers bin in that sentence and no line that anybody arrived at the end of. The Holy Spirit is not described there as running short; He is described as choosing.

Now here is the pit, and it is deeper than the wanting.

The wanting itself is bearable. What is not bearable is what the wanting quietly becomes over twenty-six years, which is a theory about yourself. The theory says that the good stuff was distributed at the front of the line and you came in late. The theory says you are the understudy in your own life. And the terrible thing about that theory is that it never gets stated out loud, so it never gets examined, and a man can hold a ladder for a quarter of a century with a slow accusation running underneath him the whole time.

You have been carrying a theory that was never true, and there is no evidence anywhere in Scripture for a God who runs out. The written word puts the question back the other way and does it with a sort of holy bluntness: who made a person's mouth, He asks Moses, who makes one able to speak and another not? Is it not I? (Exodus 4:11). And the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hear that as a Maker speaking rather than as a rebuke.

Notice what God does not do in that conversation. He does not tell Moses what he has got instead. He does not offer him a compensating strength. He simply puts His own hand back on the question of who made him, and that turns out to be the thing Moses actually needed, which was not a better set of abilities but a settled maker.

So the longing does not have to be cured before you can be at peace. Those are two different jobs and only one of them is on today's list.

You are made deliberately, and being at peace with that costs you nothing you were keeping. Scripture says you were woven together and that the making was fearful and wonderful work (Psalm 139:13 to 14), and the Spirit is the one who takes an ancient song about a body in the womb and makes it land on a man of forty-five with paint on his boots.

And there is one more thing to say, and it is the practical half.

A person who has stopped auditioning has an enormous amount of energy come back to them. Not because the wanting has gone. Because the sideways glance has gone. All the low-level attention that goes into measuring yourself against the man on the ladder is attention that has not been available for anything else, and when it comes back you will notice it in the first week.

You have permission to put the audition down today, and nobody has to release you from it because nobody ever cast you in it. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it hold: the choosing was His, it was done on purpose, and He has never once described the result as making do.