The Decision That Never Comes

Four bars of a string arrangement, looping, with a hiss on it, and every ninety seconds a woman's recorded voice thanking him for his patience and confirming that his call is important.

He has this music in his head now. He hums it while he is making toast. That is how long this has gone on.

Twenty six minutes today. Yesterday it was forty and then the line dropped. Two weeks ago a man told him the file had moved to a different team and gave him a reference number that turned out to be one digit short, and when he rang back with it nobody could find anything at all, which is the part he has stopped describing to people because of the face they make.

There is a folder on the kitchen table. It has been on the kitchen table since February, which means they eat around it, and nobody moves it, because moving it would suggest a decision has been made about how long this is going to be.

And this is what nobody outside the house understands. It is not the outcome he is losing sleep over. He could take a no. He has rehearsed a no. It is that he cannot start anything. He cannot take the other job, or not take it. He cannot say yes to the thing in October. He cannot tell his daughter whether they are moving, so she has been living for seven months in a house where nobody will answer a simple question, and he can see it starting to make her careful.

His whole life is being lived at half volume in a corridor, waiting for a door he does not control.

Maybe yours is a hospital appointment that keeps being pushed. Maybe it is a visa, a claim, a tribunal, a probate file, a panel that sits once a quarter. Maybe it is a person rather than an office. Whatever the letterhead, the shape is the same: somebody else is holding the pen, and until they move it, you are not allowed to live.

I want to tell you where your life actually is. It is not in that building.

The file is in an office. Your times are not.

David writes a psalm from the middle of exactly this. He is being talked about, planned about, decided about by people whose intentions are not good, and he is waiting on outcomes he has no control over at all. And in the middle of it he says something that has held people upright for three thousand years.

My times are in your hand.Psalm 31:15

Times. Not outcome. Not result. The word is about the seasons of a life, when things happen and how long they take, and he puts all of it in a hand that is not his own and not theirs.

Two things are being said there at once, and you need both.

The first is that he is not pretending to be in control. He does not say my times are in my hand, or if I pray hard enough my times come forward. The hand is God's, and he is genuinely not the one holding it.

The second is the one that changes a corridor into a room. If your times are in His hand, then they are not in the hand of the office. The office has your file. It has never had your life. Those are two different objects and they have been getting confused in your kitchen since February.

Now let me put Joseph beside you for a minute, because his is the only story I know that is honest about the length of these things.

He interprets a dream for a man who is about to be restored to the palace, and he asks him, reasonably, to mention him. The man goes back to his post. And the text says, flatly, that the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph but forgot him. Then the next verse opens: after two whole years.

Whoever wrote that down did not soften it. There is no encouraging aside, no line about how the time was secretly productive. Just a forgetting and then a number, and the number is two years.

I am not going to tell you that your letter comes. I do not know, and I am not willing to sell you a date I cannot deliver, because I have watched what that does to people afterwards. There is no deadline being put on God here and no timeline implied anywhere in this message.

But look at what is actually recorded about those two years. Joseph was not suspended in them. He was trusted with what was in front of him. He kept turning up to the small thing, and the prison keeper kept handing him more, and when the door finally moved he was a man who had been living, not a man who had been waiting.

And hear this carefully, because it is the lie that does the most damage in a long wait. The delay is not a verdict on you. It is not God's opinion of your worth, or evidence that you asked wrong, or a hint you failed to notice. A slow office is a slow office. Heaven has not gone quiet because you are being ignored. Silence from a building is not silence from God, and the two have been arriving through the same letterbox and you have been reading them as one thing.

So we are going to separate them. Today.