I Have Started This So Many Times

There is a particular kind of tiredness that does not come from the work.

It comes from having done the work before.

You have started this house eleven times. Maybe more. There was the time after the new year. There was the time your sister was coming. There was the week you felt strangely well and did the whole front room and thought, this is it, something has changed.

And every one of those beginnings had hope in it, real hope, the kind you cannot fake and cannot manufacture on demand. And every one of them is now in the past, and the house is here in the present, and the arithmetic of that has done something quiet and terrible to you.

It has made your own beginnings untrustworthy. Which is worse than not starting. Because a person who has not started can still believe in starting. A person who has started eleven times knows exactly what a beginning is worth, and has priced it accordingly, and the price is nothing.

I want to be careful here, because I am about to ask you to do a small thing, and I know that asking sounds like number twelve.

Behold, I will do a new thing

There is a line in Isaiah, spoken to people who had every reason to be finished with hope.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19, King James Version)

Notice the question in the middle of it.

Shall ye not know it.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is God anticipating the actual problem, which is not whether the new thing will happen but whether the people it happens to will be able to recognize it when it does. He is speaking to a nation whose capacity to notice a beginning had been worn through.

And His answer to that is not a lecture about their faith. It is a change of terrain. A way in the wilderness. Rivers in the desert. He puts the new thing in a place where it cannot be mistaken for the old thing, because the old thing never happened in a desert.

You are not being asked to believe in your own beginnings tonight, and Isaiah 43:19 has never once made recognition the reader's job to manufacture. It is written that He asks shall ye not know it and then changes the ground itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a thing recognizable to somebody who has stopped being able to tell.

You have run out of trust in your own starting, and the text puts the burden of the new thing entirely on the one doing it. The word says I will do, twice, and never once says you must be able to feel it coming, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries that difference into a house that has heard a lot of promises.

Eleven beginnings did not fail

Now I want to say something about those eleven times, and I want it to be exact.

Not one of them was a lie. Each of those beginnings was a real thing that really happened. The front room really was clear that week. The hope was not fraudulent. Nothing about it was performance.

What happened is not that the beginnings failed. What happened is that a beginning is a small quantity and the thing being carried was a large one, and eleven small quantities against a large one is not a moral event. It is arithmetic.

And here is the piece I most want you to have. Those beginnings are not gone. They are not in a bin somewhere marked wasted. The room you cleared in March was cleared in March. That happened. Time moved on and the room refilled, but the doing of it is not undone by that any more than a meal is undone by getting hungry again.

You were never a person whose beginnings do not stick, and eleven real starts against a hard stretch has never once been evidence of a defect. Isaiah 43:19 promises a way in the wilderness rather than a better traveler, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a thing that was really done from being erased by what came after.

So tonight is not number twelve in a series of failures. Tonight is number twelve in a series of real things, and I would like to add one to it.

You are permitted to begin again without believing it will hold, and the believing has never once been the part that made it count. It is written that He will make rivers in the desert, which is a promise about ground and not about a person's confidence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a start made by somebody who expects nothing from it.

One surface, with no promises attached

So here is what I am asking, and I want to strip every promise off it first.

I am not going to tell you this one is different. I do not know that. I am not going to tell you this is the beginning that finally holds, because that sentence has been said to you before by people who meant it.

Clear one surface the size of a tea tray. That is all. No claim attached to it. No twelfth start. Just a tray sized piece of a room, cleared, tonight.

Then stop.

You have permission to do a thing tonight that leads nowhere at all, and its leading nowhere has never once made it worthless. Isaiah 43:19 has the new thing springing forth by His doing, and the Spirit of God is present in a small cleared surface that nobody is calling a turning point.