Sent Into Tomorrow

The roller shutter goes up while it is still dark, and the yard fills with the noise of eleven men who have not spoken yet. Cages come off the trailer sounding like a train hitting a wall. Somebody's radio is playing something nobody chose. The tea machine takes two attempts and gives up on the third, and the printer at the end of the bench pushes out route sheets one after another, still warm, and the driver at the front of the queue takes his and folds it twice without reading it, the way a man folds a thing he has folded four hundred times.

He reads it properly in the van. Seventy four drops. Two blocks of flats with no lift, an industrial estate that will eat forty minutes on its own, a school that only signs for anything before nine. He knows those roads the way he knows his own hands, and he already knows what the day will have cost him by the time the light goes.

And here is the sentence that arrives with the number, the same one every morning, worn so smooth by now that he hardly hears it any more. This is not it. Something got settled in him years ago about God having a use for his life, and he has never once stopped believing it, and this is not it. This is the thing he does while he waits for it. Seventy four drops is not an assignment. Seventy four drops is a corridor, with the assignment somewhere at the far end.

You have your own version of that sheet. A rota held to a fridge door with a magnet shaped like a strawberry. A list of people to ring back. A child to collect at three, a parent to sit with on Thursdays, a shift that starts when everybody else's finishes. And underneath it, the same quiet arithmetic runs in you: the real thing has not started yet, tomorrow is a placeholder, God is holding something for you somewhere and this is plainly not the something. Stand in the yard a minute before the vans pull out, because that arithmetic is wrong, and how wrong it is may be the best thing you hear this week.

The sheet in your hand is the assignment

I want to say first what this costs, because nobody says it and it is heavy.

When a person decides their days are a corridor, they stop being present in their own life. The drops get done and none of them matter. The meals get cooked and none of them count. Years go by in a house or a ward or a cab, and the whole time there is a second life running in the background, the one that was supposed to start, and it is always more real than the one being lived. That is a tiring way to be alive. It is tiring in a way that sleep does not touch, and if you recognize it, I am not going to pretend you invented the feeling out of ingratitude. You did not. You came by it honestly, because nobody ever told you what God actually does with an ordinary week.

Here is what He does with it.

Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him.1 Corinthians 7:17

Read the two verbs. Assigned, and called. Paul is not writing to people with interesting lives. He is writing to slaves and tradesmen and women running households in a port city, and he tells them that the life in their hands was handed to them on purpose and that God's call came to them inside it, not on the far side of it.

So hear this, and hear it as a finished thing. You are assigned. Not parked, not queued, not kept in reserve until something worthier opens up: assigned, by name, to the day with your name on it. I am not putting my own encouraging idea over you. That is what stands written in 1 Corinthians 7:17, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old sentence land in a yard at first light and become the truest thing in the vehicle.

And it goes further than assignment, because God has never in His life sent somebody somewhere and then left them to manage. When He wanted a tent built, He named a craftsman, Bezalel, and said, I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill and intelligence and knowledge and all craftsmanship. That is Exodus 31:3, and the work in question was joinery. Hinges. Thread. Measurements. The first man in Scripture said to be filled with the Spirit of God for a job was filled for careful, ordinary, physical work that somebody had to do properly.

Which means you have been supplied. Not for the life you keep picturing. For the drops, the rota, the Thursday visit, the difficult desk. What the written word says of Bezalel it says of the pattern God keeps: the One who assigns is the One who equips, and His Spirit is not embarrassed by cabinetry, or by a stairwell, or by seventy four addresses in the rain.

Now the second thing, and it is the one that turns knowing into having.

God gave you a mouth and He means for you to use it. Jesus taught that faith the size of a mustard seed speaks to a mountain and the mountain moves. Look at how little that is. Smaller than the smallest parcel on the shelf, smaller than the thing you would notice if it went missing, and it is not the size of it that does anything, it is that it opens its mouth. The reader who waits until they feel qualified to speak will wait for ever, because the feeling was never the entry requirement.

So say it. You have the standing to speak over your own tomorrow, because Jesus stood in a locked room and said, as the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you, and then He breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. John 20:21 and 22, one sentence apart, and they were never separated afterwards. The sending and the supply arrive in the same breath. That is not a promotion for the impressive ones. That is how He works, and the room He said it in was full of people who had recently run away.