I Tried To Mend It

Two years, and she can tell you exactly what she has done, and none of it was foolish.

She read first. Then she found people. She organized two evenings, which took four months each and were genuinely good and were attended by about thirty people who all said afterward how important it was.

She started a thing that met monthly and it met for nine months and then it did not.

She has written to people. She has been on the phone about this more than about anything else in her life. She has been, by any reasonable measure, faithful and energetic and warm and effective at a great many things.

And the thing she set out to do is a break that happened over centuries between enormous numbers of people, and it is exactly where it was.

She said it out loud in her kitchen in June, to nobody: I have been trying to mend something that came apart before England existed.

And she laughed, and then she did not.

Because underneath the laugh is a real problem, which is that she does not know how to stop. Stopping feels like saying it does not matter. Stopping feels like the people who told her it was a lost cause were right. Stopping feels, and this is the one she has never said out loud, like unfaithfulness.

So she keeps going, on about a quarter of the energy she started with, and she is tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

You know that tiredness.

Maybe yours is about this. Maybe you have worn yourself out on a family, or a church, or a division somewhere that is bigger than your arms. Maybe you have been told to pace yourself by people who have never tried to carry anything, which is not helpful and is sometimes even true.

Nobody set you this. That is the thing worth sitting with. Somewhere in the first fortnight you took it on, and nobody handed it to you, and you have been working for two years on an appointment you made yourself.

The sentence said to a man building something enormous

Here is a word given to a man in the middle of a project far too big for him, and it is not an encouragement to try harder.

Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Not by might. Not by power.

Those are the two things she has been using. Might is force of effort and power is capacity, and she has plenty of both and she has spent two years of them, and the sentence does not say they are wicked. It says they are not the mechanism.

And the mechanism it names is a person. By my spirit.

You are released from being the mechanism, and the work was never running on might or power in the first place. That is what Zechariah 4:6 says to a man standing in front of something enormous (Zechariah 4:6), and it is the Holy Spirit named directly in that verse as the one who does what effort cannot, which takes the outcome of two years off a woman in a kitchen.

Stopping is not what you think it is

Now the thing that has actually been keeping you going, because it is not hope.

You have been afraid that stopping means concluding it does not matter.

It does not mean that. It never did. A person can care about something enormously and not be its repairer, and those two are not the same job and one of them was never advertised.

You are permitted to care about this without being responsible for it, and setting down a repair is not the same as setting down a sorrow. Scripture says cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee (Psalm 55:22), and read what happens after the casting, which is that the person is sustained rather than emptied, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an actual transfer rather than an instruction to feel differently.

And the two years were not wasted. You have done real things, and thirty people in a room who said afterward that it mattered were not being polite. The word says be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58), and His Spirit was in every one of those four month preparations, including the group that ran for nine months and then did not.

And nothing here says who broke it

Let me say the plain thing, because a woman two years into this has met a great many people with opinions.

Nothing on this page names a party, a century, a council or a people as responsible. Not one. That is not squeamishness; it is that assigning it has been attempted continuously for a very long time by people with far better sources, and it has never once produced a mended thing.

You are not being handed a case, and nobody is being blamed here. Scripture says judge nothing before the time (1 Corinthians 4:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a resting place rather than a locked door.