I Am Waiting For The Right Season

He can give you the twelve years, year by year, and every one of them holds up.

The first two, his father was ill and then his father was dying, and nobody on earth would argue with those.

Then there were three years of work that would not have allowed it. That is not an excuse, it is a description of a schedule that a person can verify.

Then his daughter got married and there was a year of that, and then the grandchild, and then two years he does not talk about, and then last year, which was the first year in twelve where he could not immediately name the reason and so he made one, quietly, and did not examine it.

He is fifty-seven.

And what happened six weeks ago, at a table like this one, was that his brother said something entirely harmless about how it had never been the right time, and he heard the sentence from outside for the first time.

Twelve years. And in every one of those years the reason was available.

That is the uncomfortable thing he has been sitting with, and he has not said it to anybody, because saying it would sound like a man being hard on himself and his family would immediately and lovingly argue him out of it, and he does not want to be argued out of it this time.

Where this does not go

Let me say it up front, because you are at a table with people you love and you deserve straightness.

Nothing here is going to tell you that the twelve years were wasted or that any of those reasons was false. Your father was dying. That is not a reason, that is a fact, and a man who was elsewhere in those two years would have been wrong.

And nothing here is going to tell you what you are for or hand you a plan or a direction or anything that reaches past this week.

And nothing here is going to tell you that the season has arrived, because I have no idea and neither does anybody who is not in your family.

You are not being scolded for twelve years and you are not being told this is the moment. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in five words from a woman at a wedding, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to be in the right season before He would deal with him.

Whatsoever he saith unto you

Here is the sentence, and it is spoken to servants in a kitchen.

His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.John 2:5

There is a party and the wine has run out, which is a real problem with real social consequences for a family, and nobody in that kitchen has any idea what is about to happen.

And the instruction is not a plan. It is not an explanation. It contains no information about outcomes at all.

Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.

And what He says, when He says it, is: fill the waterpots with water. Which is not a solution to a wine shortage. It is the most obviously irrelevant instruction available, and it is entirely doable, and it is what those servants had in front of them.

They filled them up to the brim. That detail is in the text, which suggests somebody remembered it.

You are being offered the servants' position rather than the planner's, and what they were given was a next thing that did not look like it addressed the problem at all. I am not stretching that. John 2:5 gives no information about outcomes and John 2:7 gives an instruction about water at a wine shortage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man at a table at fifty-seven.

True reasons and seasons are different categories

Now the thing that has been sitting in you for six weeks, said out loud.

Every one of your reasons was true. All twelve years of them. I will not have that taken from you and neither should you.

But a true reason and a season are not the same category, and nobody ever notices the difference from inside, because from inside a true reason feels exactly like a closed season.

Here is the plain arithmetic that you already did and did not like. A man of fifty-seven with a family and work and parents and grandchildren will have a true reason available in every year that remains. That is not a criticism of your life. That is what a full life is.

Which means waiting for a year with no reason in it is waiting for something that does not occur in a life like yours.

You have been waiting for an empty year, and a full life does not produce one, and the word never once makes an empty year the condition of anything. Scripture is full of people doing things in impossible years, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at every one of those twelve tables and has not been holding a season back.

And this week is not the season either

Here is where I want to be exact, because a man who has waited twelve years hears now and thinks something enormous is being asked.

This week is not the season. I am not declaring one. Nobody on a page can do that and you would be right not to trust anybody who tried.

What is being asked is one thing, in front of you, this week, that requires no season and settles nothing about the twelve years.

Fill the waterpots. That is the size.

You are able to do one ordinary thing this week without any season having arrived and without deciding anything about the years behind you. Scripture never requires the right season before a person may do the next thing in front of them, and the Spirit who was given to guide is not standing at the beginning of a season you have been unable to find.