I Am Waiting For A Burden

The word people keep using is burden and she has never had one.

That is the whole thing, and it has been the whole thing for seven years, and she has never said it out loud in that form because of how it would sound in a room where three people have just described theirs.

A woman at that table said tonight that she could not stop thinking about a particular group of people and that it had woken her up. A man said his came on gradually over a year and became something he could not put down. Somebody else used the word ache and everybody nodded.

And she sat there with a mug in both hands and thought: I have never once had that.

Not never cared. She cares about a great many things, in a normal way, the way a decent person does. She would help with any of the things those three people described and would do it well.

But the weight they are talking about, the pull, the thing you cannot stop thinking about, has not arrived, and she is forty-six.

So for seven years she has not started anything. Not because she is uninterested. Because if you begin a thing without the burden then you are doing it in your own strength, and that phrase has been in her since she was young and it has a great deal of authority in her, and so she waits.

And she has begun, recently, to have a second and quieter thought, which is that perhaps the burden not arriving is itself the answer.

What this page is not going to do

Let me say it before anything else, because you are sitting with a mug in both hands and you deserve straightness.

Nothing here is going to tell you what you are for. There is no list at the bottom and no exercise and no description of you close enough to take as a diagnosis.

And nothing here is going to tell you that seven years of waiting was disobedience. It was not. You were being careful about acting in your own strength, and that came from something real, and I am not going to be clever about it.

And nothing here is going to give you a plan, a calling, or anything at all that reaches past this week.

You are not being corrected here and you are not being handed a program. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one line God says to a man who is doing exactly the right thing, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to feel something first before He would move her.

God interrupts a prayer

Here is the scene, and it is one of the strangest sentences in the Old Testament.

Israel is at the sea. The army is behind them. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do, and Moses is doing the only correct thing available, which is crying out to God.

And this is what God says.

And the LORD said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.Exodus 14:15

Wherefore criest thou unto me.

God interrupts the prayer. Not because prayer is wrong. Because at that particular moment the thing to do was to move, and Moses was doing the spiritually appropriate thing instead of the thing.

And notice what Moses is not given. No plan. No explanation of the sea. No feeling. He is not told how it will work. He is told the direction and the direction is forward.

You have been doing the spiritually appropriate thing in a moment where the instruction was to move, and God said that to a man in the middle of a prayer rather than to a man in rebellion. I am not stretching that. Exodus 14:15 interrupts a legitimate prayer with an imperative to go forward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman at a table with a mug in both hands.

Burden is not a biblical requirement

Now let me say something plain that nobody in that room said, and I want to be careful with it because I am not going to mock anybody's experience.

Those three people described something real. Burdens are real. God does put a weight on people and it does keep them awake and it does become something they cannot put down, and everything they said at that table was true about them.

It is just not in Scripture as a requirement.

Look at the people who were sent. Moses argued. Gideon asked for proof twice and then again. Jonah went the other way. Jeremiah said he was too young. Not one of those men is described as having a burden that woke him up before he was told what to do, and several of them are described as actively not wanting it.

The one thing all of them have in common is an instruction, not a feeling.

You have been waiting for a qualification that Scripture never once lists, and the people God sent are on record as having argued rather than ached. The word records the sending without the feeling in half a dozen lives, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that table with you for seven years and has never once been withholding a burden as a signal.

And what is being asked is one week

Here is where I want to be exact, because a woman who has waited seven years hears the word start and thinks of something enormous.

You are not being asked to begin a work. You are not being asked to choose a direction, or to take on the group of people that woman described, or to decide anything about the seven years.

One thing in front of you this week. Something ordinary that already exists in your week and does not require you to have resolved anything.

Not because small things lead to big ones. I am not making that promise and nobody should.

Because forward is a direction and a week is a direction, and the instruction at the sea was not a plan.

You are able to take one ordinary thing this week without a burden and without deciding one thing about the seven years. Scripture never requires a person to feel before they may obey, and the Spirit who was given to guide is not waiting at the far end of a feeling you have not been given.