The Invitation You Turned Down

Ngozi said no in March, seven years ago, and she has taken that decision out and looked at it again about once a year ever since.

It was a real invitation. Not a vague suggestion over coffee: a proper approach, from people who meant it, to something considerably larger than what she was doing, and it would have suited her and she would have been good at it.

She thought about it for three weeks. She prayed about it properly. And she said no, and she has never been able to fully explain why to anybody who asked, which is part of the problem.

The reasons she gave at the time were true and sounded thin. There were people in the middle of things. There was one family in particular. There was a sense, which she could not put into a sentence, that leaving then would have been leaving rather than going.

So she stayed, and the seven years have been good, and the family in the middle of things came out the other side, and she was there for it and it mattered.

And every spring, roughly, usually with no trigger she can identify, the decision comes back out of the drawer and she looks at it again.

Not with regret exactly. That is the strange part. She does not think she was wrong. She simply cannot let it be finished, and she has never once asked herself why a settled decision needs an annual review.

You have your own version. There was a thing you said no to, and you have re-examined it more times than you would admit, and the re-examining has never produced a different answer.

Nobody here is going to tell you whether you were right. I do not know your situation and I was not there in March.

But there is a verse about staying put that is easier on you than the annual review has been.

Paul says it three times in one passage and it is not about ambition

There is a line in 1 Corinthians 7 that Paul repeats in different forms three times in about ten verses, which is how you know he means it.

Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.1 Corinthians 7:20

The context is not careers. He is talking about circumstances people were in when they came to faith, and his repeated point is that the circumstance itself is not the spiritual question everybody assumes it is.

And notice that he is not against change. Two verses later he says that if a person can be free, they should use it. He is not chaining anybody to a position.

What he is doing is removing the assumption that the bigger or different thing is inherently the more spiritual one. He puts abide in as a legitimate answer, three times, in a letter to a church that was extremely interested in status.

And staying put was always a real option and not a failure to move. That is not my reading: the written word offers abiding as an answer in its own right and repeats it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has reopened one decision seven times.

And you are not behind because you are still here. The word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, which puts the placing in His hands, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are.

Why a settled decision needs an annual review

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth having because it is not doubt.

A yes produces evidence. If Ngozi had gone, she would have seven years of results, and some of them would have been good and some would not, and either way she would know what she had chosen.

A no produces nothing to look at. It has no output. The seven years that followed are not evidence about the decision, because they would have happened in some form whatever she chose, and she cannot run the other branch.

So the file never closes, because there is nothing to close it with.

That is not indecision and it is not lack of faith. It is a structural feature of every no anybody has ever said, and it means the annual review is not a symptom of something wrong with her. It is what a decision without evidence does, forever, unless somebody decides to stop.

And you are permitted to close it without proof. The word says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, and it says that about matters where two believers could reasonably differ, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine permission rather than a way of avoiding a hard question.

And the branch you did not take is not yours to see. The word says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person leave something in that category rather than working at it every spring.

Nobody is telling you the no was right

I want that plain, because a message that reassures you would be doing the same thing the annual review does, which is treating the question as still open.

I do not know whether the bigger thing would have been good. It might have been. Some people say no to things they should have said yes to, and the reasons at the time are always true and thin, and I am not going to pretend that never happens.

What I can tell you is that seven years of review has not produced information, and that another seven will not either.

And I can tell you that Scripture does not treat abide as the coward's option. It puts it on the table three times, in a chapter written to people who cared a great deal about position.

And whichever way it went, you are not outside His keeping. The word says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and it adds that though he fall he shall not be utterly cast down, so both branches are inside the sentence about the ordering, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor rather than a comfort.