I Am Waiting To Feel Ready

I want to start by telling you that I know you have tried to want this.

That is the part people never see. From the outside it looks like you have not got round to it. From the inside you have spent two years standing in your own house waiting to feel the thing that would let you begin, and it has not come, and you have started to draw a conclusion about yourself from that.

The conclusion goes something like this. Other people must feel something I do not feel. They must get a lift, a spark, some small engine that turns over when they look at a room. And I do not have one, and I have not had one since whatever happened happened, and so this is just how I am now.

I want to take that apart tonight, gently, because I think it is the single most expensive sentence in your house.

Not because you are wrong that the feeling is missing. You are right about that. I want to argue about what the feeling was ever for.

It is God which worketh in you

There is a verse in Philippians that most people read as encouragement and which is actually a piece of engineering.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13, King James Version)

Read the order in that line, because the order is the whole thing.

To will. And to do.

The willing is in there. It is named as a thing that gets worked in a person rather than a thing a person is supposed to arrive already carrying. Paul is not writing to people brimming with motivation. He is writing to a church he has just told to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, which is not the vocabulary of people who feel great.

You are named in that sentence as somebody the willing is worked in, and it has never once been listed among the things you were supposed to bring. It is written that God works both the will and the deed, which is a supply and not a requirement, and the Spirit of God is the one who does that working in a person who arrived with nothing.

And into that he says the willing is His work in them.

So the wanting is not the entrance fee. The wanting is part of what is being supplied.

You are not disqualified by an absence of motivation, and Philippians 2:13 has never once required a person to arrive already willing. It is written that God works both the will and the deed, which puts the wanting inside the supply rather than at the door, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that work in a person who cannot manufacture it.

You have been trying to produce, on your own, the exact thing this verse says is given. The word names the willing as His working and not as your qualification, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes that burden off a tired person without embarrassing them for having carried it.

The feeling comes second, and it always did

Now something practical that took me years to learn and that nobody says out loud.

Motivation is not what starts things. It is what shows up after things have started, if it shows up at all.

Watch anybody who keeps a house. They are not standing in the kitchen waiting to be moved. They put a hand on something while thinking about something else entirely, and the doing is what wakes the small bit of willingness, not the other way round.

The sequence got turned around on you, and it got turned around for a good reason. When life is going well the feeling and the doing arrive so close together that they look like one event. After a hard stretch they come apart, and then a person can see that they were never the same thing, and it looks like a loss when it is only visible now.

You were never missing an engine that other people have, and what came apart was the order of two things that used to arrive together. Philippians 2:13 puts the willing and the doing in one sentence with God working both, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies the first without waiting for anybody to feel it.

So we are going to move without the feeling tonight. Not against it. Not in defiance of it. Just without it, the way a person walks to the kitchen at two in the morning with no enthusiasm about the kitchen.

You are able to do a thing you do not feel like doing, and doing it that way has never once made it fake. It is written that He works in you both to will and to do, which means the deed is His work whether the feeling arrived or not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unmotivated action count for exactly as much as an inspired one.

Do it badly and without enthusiasm

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Clear one surface the size of a tea tray. Do not wait until it feels right. Do not do a run up. Do not build up to it.

Do it the way a person takes a coat off. No ceremony. No feeling required.

Take what is on it off it, put it anywhere, do not sort a thing. Then stop.

You have everything required tonight, and none of it has ever included wanting to. Philippians 2:13 gives the willing to God to work, and the Spirit of God is present in a flat, unenthusiastic, correctly done small thing exactly as He is in a joyful one.