I Am Waiting To Be Asked

There is a thing that needs doing and she has been able to see it for seven years.

It is not dramatic. She would be embarrassed if you knew how small it is. It is not a criticism of anybody and it does not imply that the people in charge have failed at anything, and if she described it to you your first reaction would be that surely somebody is already on that.

Nobody is. She has checked, carefully, twice, in a way designed not to look like checking.

And she has done nothing about it for seven years, because nobody has asked her to.

That is the whole of it and she is quite clear about her own reasoning. Doing a thing you have not been asked to do is putting yourself forward. It is announcing that you have noticed something the leadership has not, which is a kind of criticism whether you intend it or not, and it is taking on something that was not yours to take.

She has seen people do that badly. Everybody has. There is a specific kind of person who appoints themselves to things and it causes damage.

So she waits. Seven years. And she is at a work morning on a Saturday with a radio on and paint going on a wall, and the thing is still not done, and she can still see it, and nobody has asked.

Where this does not go

Let me be exact at the start, because this is a subject where a page can do harm.

Nothing here is going to tell you to go around your leadership, take something on that is theirs, or announce anything to anybody. This page cannot see your church and does not know what the thing is and has no business steering any of that.

And nothing here is going to tell you that seven years of restraint was cowardice. It was not. You have watched self-appointment do damage and you were right to be careful.

And nothing here is going to hand you a plan or a permission or anything that reaches past this week.

You are not being told to go ahead of anybody and you are not being scolded for seven years. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a scene where a man does something quietly at night before he says a word, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to be asked before He would deal with her.

He went out at night and told no man

Here is the scene, and it is one of the most careful pieces of behavior in the Old Testament.

Nehemiah has heard about the walls. He has wept, fasted and prayed. He has been given leave by a king. And he arrives in Jerusalem, and what he does next is the part people skip.

And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem.Nehemiah 2:12

Neither told I any man.

He goes out at night. He rides along the walls. He looks at the gates. He gets a complete picture of the actual state of the thing.

And he tells nobody. Not the priests, not the nobles, not the rulers. He says so explicitly two verses later: the rulers knew not whither I went, or what I did.

Only after all of that does he go and speak, and when he speaks he has something concrete to say.

You are watching a man do real work before any conversation happens, and Scripture records the quietness as part of the wisdom rather than as a failure of nerve. I am not stretching that. Nehemiah 2:12 has him telling no man on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman at a work morning with paint on her hands.

Self-appointment and a night ride are different

Now the distinction that has been missing from your seven years, and it is worth having.

The thing you have rightly been avoiding is self-appointment. Announcing yourself. Taking authority that was not given. Making a public move that implies a criticism.

None of that is what Nehemiah did that night.

He went and looked. Quietly. He gathered what was actually true. He put himself in a position to be useful without asking anybody for anything and without telling anybody he was doing it.

That is a category that has not existed in your thinking for seven years. You have had two options in your head: be asked, or put yourself forward. And there is a third thing in the text, and it happens at night, and nobody knows about it.

You have been choosing between two options when Scripture shows a third, and the third one requires no permission because it asks nothing of anybody. That is Nehemiah 2:12 in its own account, and the Spirit who searches all things has been with you through seven years of restraint and has not been withholding an invitation.

And what is being asked is one week

Here is the precise thing, and it is smaller than the wall.

Not the thing you have seen for seven years. This page does not know what it is and is not asking you to act on it.

One ordinary thing in front of you this week that requires nobody's permission because it asks nothing of anybody. Something that is genuinely yours to do.

Not because doing it will lead to being asked. That is a promise about outcomes and I will not make it.

Because a night ride is a real category, and there are things in every week that belong to a person without a single conversation being required.

You are able to do one ordinary thing this week that nobody has to be told about and nobody has to approve. Scripture never once requires a person to be asked before they may do what is already theirs, and the Spirit who was given to guide is not waiting behind somebody else's invitation.