I Kept A List Of What I Was Working On

He found it in a box in the loft, in a Bible he had stopped using around 2016, on a folded piece of paper that had been in there so long it had taken the shape of the page.

He knew what it was before he opened it. He remembered making it.

He was thirty-two. He had been at a thing, and the man speaking had said something about being specific, and he had come home and sat at the kitchen table and written down four things he wanted God to deal with in him.

Not vague things. He had been deliberate. He remembers being slightly pleased with how honest he had been.

He is forty-three now and he was in the loft looking for a box of cables.

And he stood there under the light in the roof with a piece of paper in his hand and read four items in his own handwriting, and all four are still true.

Not one of them has gone. Not one of them has even moved enough that he could argue about it. If he sat down at that table tonight and did the exercise again, honestly, he would write the same four words, and he would probably write them in the same order, because the order was not random then either.

Eleven years.

And he came down the ladder and did not say anything to anybody about it, and put the paper in the drawer in the kitchen where things go that you do not know what to do with, and it has been there since March.

And that is you with your own folded piece of paper, or you would have stopped reading.

Whose project it is, and how long it is scheduled to take

Here is a sentence Paul writes to people he loves, and it is worth noticing what he is confident about and what he is not.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Three things in that, and every one of them is aimed at a man on a ladder with a piece of paper.

He who began. Not you. The starting was His, which means the list was never entirely your project even when you were writing it at a kitchen table feeling pleased with your own honesty.

Will bring it to completion. The finishing is His too. Paul is sure about the outcome and the sureness is not about the person, it is about who is doing it.

And then the third, which is the one you need.

At the day of Jesus Christ.

That is the completion date. Paul gives one, and it is not eleven years, and it is not a decade, and it is not any point inside a human life.

You are inside a work with a stated finish, and the finish is not scheduled for a Tuesday in your forties. It is written that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6). The Holy Spirit is the One at work in that, and the timetable in the verse is longer than the one you have been grading yourself against.

Now let me look at the four items honestly, because you will not be helped by anything soft here.

They are still true. I believe you. You are a man who does not overstate things and if you say all four would be written again tonight, all four would be written again tonight.

You are not required to show movement on a list for the work to be happening. It is written that the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how (Mark 4:27), and the man in that parable has no readout at all. The Holy Spirit does not owe a progress report to the person being worked on.

And here is the thing I want you to sit with, because I think it is the actual answer.

You wrote four specific things at thirty-two and you can still name them at forty-three. That is not the description of a man who has drifted. That is a man who has kept his own file open for eleven years, honestly, without flattering himself, and who went white in a loft rather than shrugging.

A man in whom nothing was happening would have found that paper and felt nothing at all.

You are not looking at evidence of stalling, and the ache you felt in the loft is not the feeling of a man who has given up. It is written that it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), and the willing is named there as His work too. The Holy Spirit put that ache in a man on a ladder, and it belongs to the same project as the list.