The Offer That Got Too Long to Say

She finishes at two on a Tuesday, and she has finished at two on a Tuesday for nine months.

Two doors down there is a young mother with a boy of three and a girl who is nearly one, and Tuesday is the day that woman's whole week comes apart. Everybody on that path can see it. The car door open and both of them crying and the seat belt jammed and the diaper bag half in the gutter, at exactly the hour when Netta is standing at her own window with her coat off and nothing in her afternoon.

Netta has been going to offer since October.

The first version was seven words. I could take them Tuesday if you like.

Then she thought about it in bed and added, only if you want to, obviously. Then she added a bit about how she is around anyway so it is no trouble at all. Then, because she did not want it to sound as though she thought the woman was struggling, she added a clause explaining that she is not saying that. Then she added something warm at the front so it did not land cold. Then she moved the clause about not thinking she is struggling, because in the middle it sounded worse.

By March the sentence was about forty five seconds long, and it needed a table and two cups of tea, and there is no forty five seconds at a gate. There is four. You get four seconds at a gate while somebody is wrestling a car seat, and Netta's offer no longer fit inside four seconds, so it never came out at all.

And every Tuesday she stood at her window and watched, and hated herself a small amount, and put the kettle on.

Then in June she was putting the recycling out at ten past two and the woman came past on the path with the boy dragging on one arm and the whole thing about to go, and Netta said, out of nowhere, in a voice she did not recognize:

I finish at two on a Tuesday. Do you want me to have them?

Seven words and a question. Nine months of drafting, and the version that came out was the first one.

The woman stood there on the path and started crying, which neither of them had planned on at all.

You have a Tuesday too. Yours might be a car, or a casserole dish, or an hour on a Thursday, or knowing how to sort out a form. And you have a sentence about it that has been getting longer since October. Sit with me a while. Nobody here is going to ask you to do more than you have got.

Where the sending actually starts

Let me name the low part first, because you have been calling it the wrong thing.

You have been calling it selfishness, and it is not. What is actually happening is that you are afraid of getting it wrong: of implying she cannot manage, of being turned down and having to keep passing her on the path afterward, of offering something so small it is insulting. Every clause you added to that sentence was there to protect her, and one or two of them were there to protect you, and none of it was laziness.

And underneath, quietly, is the bigger thing, which is that you do not really believe an afternoon counts. When you think about God doing something, you do not picture a path outside your own house at ten past two. You picture somewhere else, and someone with more to give.

So come to the last thing Jesus says before He goes.

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.Acts 1:8

There is an order in that sentence and the order is not decoration. Jerusalem is first. Not as a warm up and not as a training ground before the real assignment, but first, named first, by the Lord Himself, in the same breath as the ends of the earth. Luke records the same commission elsewhere with the phrase beginning at Jerusalem, Luke 24:47, and Jerusalem was the street they were standing on.

So hear this over you where you are sitting. You are already inside the sending, on the path, at your own gate, and it is not a lesser posting. Scripture puts your own street first in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the power named in that same verse: He is not somewhere else waiting for you to relocate before He starts.

And look at the word He uses. Witnesses. Not volunteers, not staff, not the qualified. A witness is somebody who was there. That is the entire job description, and the only qualification is having been present, which you were, at your own window, every Tuesday since October.

You have what you need already in your hands. That is not a slogan, it is the shape of the verse: the power is His, the place is where you are standing, and the thing you are being sent with is an afternoon that already exists. The word says it and the Spirit is the one who makes it move, and neither of them is asking you to become somebody with more.

Now let me take three things off you, because you are carrying all three.

Nobody here is telling you to do more. If your Tuesday is not actually free, this message is not asking for it, and God is not either. There is a kind of preaching that runs on making tired people feel guilty, and there is none of it in this room. The offer in your mouth is one you already have the hours for, or it would not have been in your mouth since October.

Nobody here is telling you it has to be big. Paul told a church, as we have opportunity, let us do good unto all men, Galatians 6:10, and opportunity is a small word for a thing that comes past your gate at ten past two.

And nobody here is asking you to make it perfect. This is where you have been stuck for nine months, and it is worth naming plainly: you have been trying to build a sentence that cannot possibly be misunderstood, and there is no such sentence. The extra clauses were never making it safer. They were making it too heavy to lift.

So cut it back. Seven words. I finish at two on a Tuesday, do you want me to have them. That is enough, and the reason it is enough is not that you are eloquent, but that it is true and it is offered.

You have God working in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, Philippians 2:13, which means the wanting itself, the nine months of wanting to offer, was already Him at work. That was not you failing for nine months. That was the Spirit of God putting something in you and keeping it there while you got your courage up.