The Waiting Room of My Own Life

There is a life you have been waiting to begin, and this one has not been counting.

Not consciously. Nobody sits down and decides that the current decade is a waiting room. It assembles itself out of a thousand small postponements, and after enough of them a person is living in a lobby without ever having walked into one.

The real life is the one that starts after. It has details in it. You know what you would wear in it and how you would be at a party and what you would say yes to. It is not vague at all, which is what makes it so expensive.

And this life, the one with your actual children in it and your actual kitchen and this particular October, has been filed as the interval before.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have worked at the condition for entry for years and you have gotten up every time. Somebody who did not care would have started living without permission.

So this page is not going to tell you that the other life is not coming. It might. What I am saying is that this one is not a lobby.

I want to show you a verse about what Jesus came to give, and notice what tense it is in.

A lobby has details in it too

Consider the trick in the arrangement, because it is subtle and it has fooled better people than either of us.

The waiting room does not feel like waiting. It feels like preparation, which is respectable, and it also feels like realism, which is unanswerable. Nobody is idle in there. There is work going on. That is why nobody has ever suggested it is a lobby.

The tell is not in how you spend the time. The tell is in what you decline. Look at what you have said no to on the grounds of not yet, and the list will be long, and none of the reasons will have been about capacity.

You have a list of declines rather than a list of failures, and no not-yet has ever once been the same thing as a cannot. John 10:10 says I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse about life arrive on somebody who has been treating hers as an interval.

And notice how specific the other life is. That is the expensive part. A vague future costs nothing. A detailed one takes up room, and it has been taking up room in your actual house for years, sitting in the chair where the current life should be.

You have a detailed future occupying your present, and no imagined life has ever once had a right to that chair. The written word says I am come that they might have life, in the present, and the Spirit of God is the one who evicts an imagined thing from a real room.

That they might have life

Jesus says it about Himself and the tense matters.

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. (John 10:10, King James Version)

I am come. Already arrived. The purpose is stated in the past tense of the arrival and the present tense of the having.

And what is offered is life, which is not a condition or a stage. It is the thing itself, available to be had, and the word abundantly is added to make sure nobody reads it as survival.

You are offered the thing itself rather than a stage of it, and no abundance has ever once been scheduled for later. John 10 puts the coming in the past and the having in the present, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a tense into something a woman can stand on.

And read what He does not say. He does not say I am come that they might one day have life. There is no waiting room anywhere in the sentence, and the man saying it is standing in front of people whose circumstances were not about to improve.

You have a sentence with no waiting room in it, and no circumstance of yours has ever once had to improve first. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a present offer feel present, and the written word says that they might have it more abundantly.

Do one thing that belongs to the other life

Now the part I came to say.

Do one thing today that belongs to the life that has not started yet. One thing off that list.

Wear the thing. Say yes to the invitation. Sit at the table rather than serving from the kitchen. Go to the thing on Saturday. Whatever the actual item is, and you already know what it is, because that life has details.

You have one item off that list available today, and no condition of entry has ever once been required to take one. The written word says I am come that they might have life, stated in the present, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an item from a postponed list possible on an ordinary Thursday.

And here is why one item, done now, does what waiting could not. Every item on that list is currently holding the claim that this life is a lobby. Take one item out of the future and do it in the present and the claim is broken, because the item is now in the wrong room for the theory.

You have an item in the wrong room for the theory, and no theory has ever once survived a fact placed inside it. The Spirit of God is the one who moves one thing from a future life into a present one, and John 10:10 is the written word underneath it, where the coming is finished and the having is now and the abundance is not on a schedule.