Nobody Has Ever Said Go

Faris has started four things, and not one of them began with anybody saying go.

The first was a group in a front room that ran for two years and did a great deal of good and then stopped, mostly because he moved. The second was a thing at work that he still cannot describe in a sentence and that eleven people would tell you changed their year. The third did not work. He would say that plainly and without drama: it did not work, he read the room wrong, and he shut it down after eight months.

The fourth is the one he is in now, and it is going, and it is real.

And last week, sitting in a car outside it with the engine off, he thought a sentence that has been forming in him for about a decade and had never once made it all the way to language.

Nobody has ever sent me anywhere.

Not a person. Not a room. Nobody has ever laid a hand on his shoulder and said, out loud, in front of others, go and do that thing. He has watched other people get that. He has been in the building when it happened for somebody else and been glad about it and meant the gladness.

He has simply never been on the receiving end of it, in twenty-two years, in four things.

And here is what makes it complicated rather than sad, and I want to be careful with it.

He is not sure he was ever meant to be. That is the honest position. Because there is a version of Faris he can see quite clearly, a version who waited, properly, for a room to say go, and who therefore never started the first thing, and eleven people would have had a different year.

So he has been carrying two questions at once, and they do not fit together.

Was I ever sent? And: what would I have missed if I had waited?

You have your own version of this. You have started something, or four somethings, and you have never had the moment. There is a small unfinished feeling that runs underneath all of it, and it does not stop the work and it never has, and it has never once gone quiet either.

Nobody is telling you that you were wrong to start. Nothing here is going to say that.

But it is worth knowing where a sending actually comes from, because it is not from where most people are waiting for it.

The room did not think of it

There is a scene in Acts that people quote for the sending and misread for the source.

As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.Acts 13:2

Look at what the room was doing when it happened. Ministering to the Lord, and fasting. They were not in a planning meeting. There is no suggestion anywhere in the text that anybody had raised the subject, drawn up a list, or wondered aloud who ought to go.

And then look at the tense of the last clause. Whereunto I have called them. Past tense. Already done. The calling had happened before that room opened its mouth, and what the room did was not to generate a sending but to hear one and agree with it.

That is the whole mechanism and it matters enormously for a man sitting in a car with the engine off.

You are not waiting on a committee. That is not my encouragement: the written word puts the calling in the past tense before the room ever speaks, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody who has been quietly waiting twenty-two years for a person to notice him.

And the Spirit is the one who does the sending. The word says the Holy Ghost said, and two verses later that they were sent forth by the Holy Ghost, and it is the Spirit Himself named twice in four verses as the sender, which means the thing you have been waiting for a person to do was never in a person's gift to do.

What the room is actually for, and why it still matters

Now hear the other half, because half of this does damage.

The room was not decoration. Those men laid hands on Barnabas and Saul and let them go, and later, when the work was done, the pair came back to that same church and reported. The sending was God's and the confirming was theirs, and the text gives both without embarrassment.

So this is not a message telling you that you do not need anybody. That is the exact error that has hurt a great many people who read something like this and went off on their own strength, and I am not going to add to their number.

You are not being told to appoint yourself. Nothing in Scripture has a man commissioning himself, and the Spirit of God has never once worked that way with anybody, and if what rises in you reading this is then I do not need them, that is not Him.

The thing to see is smaller and truer. A sending is recognized, not manufactured. Which means that if it is real, it does not depend on somebody having said the words, and it also does not lose anything by somebody saying them.

And if nobody ever has, that is a real absence and I am not going to talk you out of feeling it. It is worth grieving a little. Being sent by people you love is one of the good gifts and you have not had it.

But you are not unsent. The word says His sheep hear His voice and He goeth before them, and the going before is His, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt thing in a man rather than a doctrine about somebody else.

The tell between the two

Here is the diagnostic, and it is the reason this article exists rather than a general encouragement.

Restlessness and sending look identical from the outside for about the first six months. Both of them get a person moving. Both of them feel like conviction. Nobody can tell them apart at the start, including you, and anybody who says they can spot it immediately in another person is guessing out loud.

The difference shows up later, and it shows up in two places.

The first is what happens when it costs something. Restlessness leaves when the thing gets boring, and it always finds a reason that sounds like discernment. A sending stays through the boring part, because the going was never about how it felt.

The second is what happens when it works. Restlessness needs the next thing almost immediately. A sending can sit still in what it started.

Faris shut the third one down after eight months and did not go looking for a fourth for two years. That is worth noticing about him and he has never once noticed it about himself.

And you are able to tell the difference in yourself. Not once you are wiser: the word says the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, and He is given to you, so the discernment you have been waiting to acquire is not a skill you are behind on, it is a Person you already have.