The List Gets Longer Every Year

She wrote the first version of it in a notebook six years ago and she still has the notebook.

It was four things. Somewhere to meet, somebody to help with the children, a bit of money to get going, and one other person who was actually committed rather than interested.

That was the list. Four things, and then she would start.

She has the current version in her phone and she has not counted it recently because she does not want to. It is more than four. Somewhere in the third year it acquired a section about safeguarding, which is entirely proper and which she should have thought of at the start. In the fourth year it acquired something about a website. Last spring it acquired the sentence find out whether this is even needed, which she added after a conversation that discouraged her, and which is the only item on it she suspects is not honest.

Six years.

She is not lazy. She works, she raises three children, she is at everything and she is the one people ask. This is not a woman avoiding effort.

And what she has begun to notice, and has not said out loud, is that the list is not a plan.

Every time she gets near completing an item, another one appears. It has happened often enough now that she has stopped being able to pretend she has not noticed the pattern, which is that the list is doing a job, and the job is not preparation.

Not many of them were wise, or influential, or well born

Let me be fair to the list before anything else, because some of it is real.

Safeguarding is not a delaying tactic and you were right to add it and you would be wrong to drop it. Some of what is on there is the ordinary, boring, necessary furniture of doing anything with people, and a woman who ignored all of it would be building something worse.

But you know which items are which. You said so yourself about the one from last spring, and a person who can identify the dishonest item on their own list is a person who has already done the hard part.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: the thing you are part of moved before it had almost any of what you are waiting for. That is not my kind reading of six years, it is what stands written in the first chapter of First Corinthians, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line has been at that kitchen table with you.

Read it, and notice that it is not flattering to anybody.

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.1 Corinthians 1:26-27

Not many of you were wise. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth.

That is a description of the people it was actually spreading through. Not a strategy, not an aspiration, a plain observation about who was in those rooms.

No standing. No money. No platform. No premises. And it moved across an empire.

So this is yours right now rather than pending item nine: you are already equipped in the only sense that has ever been required, because the written word describes the movement going forward through people with none of what you are waiting for, and the Spirit of God is the one who has never once been held up by a shortage.

And the guard, because this category can be misused and I am not going to misuse it.

None of this says do it badly. None of it says that resources do not help, or that the people who work at premises and budgets are missing the point. They are not, and a great deal of good has been done with money and rooms, and there is nothing romantic about scarcity.

What is written is simply that the shortage was never the thing standing in the way, and the Holy Spirit has been building with under-resourced people from the beginning because that is who was available.