A Quote Book of Jobs He Cannot Take

The book is on the kitchen table because that is where somebody put it when they emptied the truck, and it has been there for six days and nobody in the house will move it.

It is a spiral bound quote book, the cheap kind with carbon copies, the sort you buy three at a time. It has lived on the dashboard of that truck for two years and it has a ring on the cover from a coffee cup and a crease down one corner from being shut in the door.

Every page in it is his handwriting.

March: kitchen, the Harpers, dates penciled at the top with a question mark because she had not decided about the island. April: the barn, four weeks, and a little sketch in the margin of how the steel would sit, drawn upside down so the customer could see it. May: decking and a pergola for the couple on Mill Lane, who took two years to decide and rang him on a Sunday to say yes, sounding so pleased with themselves. June, half booked. A note to himself about scaffolding.

Ten weeks of work, sitting on a kitchen table in a cheap book with a coffee ring on it.

And he cannot lift a bag of sand.

He cannot lift the kettle properly yet, which is the detail that keeps ambushing him, because a man can be philosophical about a barn conversion and then be undone entirely by a kettle at half past six in the morning.

The consultant was good. Straight, kind, did not rush him, drew a diagram on a bit of paper and turned it round so he could see it, which he appreciated more than he could say at the time. And then said a number of months, and then said, "and then we will see."

We will see. Six days he has been hearing that in his sleep.

The phone keeps going. Every one of those pages has a person attached to it who is waiting on a start date, and every one of them will have to be rung, and he has to say a sentence out loud that he has never once had to say in twenty two years.

He has not rung any of them yet.

That is you, and it does not have to be a quote book. It might be a calendar with a whole year in it. It might be the offer letter, or the visa appointment, or the spare room with the paint already bought, or the course you were three modules into, or the retirement you had drawn out on the back of an envelope with your wife three months ago and both of you laughing about the caravan.

Your next five years existed. You could describe them. And now they do not exist, and it took one conversation, and there was no warning between the two states.

Two things straight away, and I will hold to both of them the whole way through. I am not going to tell you what this is for. I do not know, and anybody who does know is guessing at your expense. And I am not going to tell you that the plan in that book was somehow the wrong plan, because it was a good plan, drawn up by a careful man, and it did not fail because of anything in it.

The proverb does not say the plan was the problem

Here is the verse under this message, and it is one of the most quoted and most misused sentences in the whole book.

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.Proverbs 16:9

Read what it actually does and does not say.

It does not say the devising was arrogance. It does not scold the man for having a way in his heart. Devising is simply what a working man does; you cannot quote a barn conversion without devising, and there is no version of your trade that does not involve a book full of April.

And here is the part I want you to notice most. It does not say one word about why a plan comes apart.

People will use this verse on you in the next two weeks, and some of them will use it to mean that God pulled your April out from under you for reasons of His own that you would thank Him for if you could see the whole picture. That is not in this proverb. That is somebody's theory, wearing this proverb like a jacket.

You are not being told here that your plan was wrong, and nothing in the written word makes a careful man's April into a fault. The proverb in Proverbs 16:9 sets devising and directing side by side without ever putting the man in the wrong for the first half, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies Scripture to a person rather than the loudest voice in the room. Your book was not pride. It was a trade.

Steps are a stride long

Now look at the second half, because that is where the actual comfort is, and it is smaller and better than the thing people try to make it.

The Lord directs his steps. Steps. Not his decade. Not his spring. Not the ten weeks with the deposits and the start dates. A step is about a yard long and it happens now.

That is not a downgrade. That is the exact size of the only thing a man can actually be given at half past six in the morning with a kettle he cannot lift.

You have the next step, and it is held by somebody who is not guessing. What is written says the Lord directs the steps of a man, present tense, in the middle of a proverb that has just admitted the man's own plan may not stand, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called a guide into all truth rather than a giver of five year projections. He is not withholding the map from you as a test. Steps are simply the unit He works in.

I am not going to tell you that the work comes back, or when, or in what shape. I do not know that and I will not pretend to. What the doctors are doing is good and ordinary and you should keep doing every bit of it, and none of that is in competition with anything I am saying here.

You were not dropped when your spring emptied, and you are not being carried by your own arithmetic now. Scripture says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and it goes straight on to say that even when he falls he is not utterly cast down, which is a strange thing to put in a promise unless falling was expected, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ancient sentence hold weight in a kitchen on a Tuesday.