He can tell you where he will be in five years and it is not bravado, it is simply how he has lived.
The house is planned. The work is planned, with a second version in case the first does not hold. His daughter's schooling is planned through to eighteen and there is a folder. He knows what he will do if he loses his job in the spring and he knows what he will do if his mother needs to come and live with them, and both of those are written down, and neither of them keeps him awake.
He is fifty one and he is not an anxious man. That is worth saying, because the planning is not fear. He has just never found a reason to leave a thing unmapped when it could be mapped.
There is one part of his life he has no five year view of at all.
He cannot tell you where his faith is going. Not what he believes; that is settled and he could set it out for you in order. Where it is going. What it will be doing in him in five years, by what process, at what rate, arriving where.
He has nothing. Not a rough sketch. Nothing.
And here is the thing he did with that absence, and he did it a long time ago and has never revisited it.
He filed it as a defect in himself.
Everything else in his life has a direction he can name, so the one thing that does not must be the one thing he has failed to attend to properly, and somewhere around forty he decided that a serious man would have worked this out by now, and he has carried a low grade sense of negligence about it for eleven years.
He said one sentence about it to a friend in this study in April, with the papers pushed aside, and then changed the subject.
He said: I do not know where it goes, and I think that is my fault.
You know the absence. Yours may sit somewhere else entirely. But you know what it is to find one unmapped thing in an otherwise mapped life, and to assume without examining it that the blank is a report on you.
The not knowing is the description
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this turns into a general argument for mystery you will nod at it and change nothing, and you are not a man who is moved by a mood.
You are not negligent for having no chart, and you were never issued a destination to keep. John 3:8 names both directions and rules out knowing either, of every one born of the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves as He wills.
The pit is this. You have applied one standard to every part of your life, and it is a good standard and it has served your family well, and you have applied it to a thing that Jesus explicitly described as not working that way, and then read the mismatch as negligence.
Here is the verse.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8
Read what He does with the two directions.
Whence it cometh. Whither it goeth. Origin and destination, the two things a planner needs, and He names them both and says you cannot tell either one.
And then, so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
That is not a caution. It is not Jesus apologizing for a thin explanation to a man who deserved better. Nicodemus was a serious man asking a serious question in good faith at night, and this is the answer he was given, and it was given on purpose.
He also says you hear the sound of it. That is not nothing. It is exactly the thing you have: a life that has demonstrably been moved by something you cannot chart, which is what the sound of a wind is.
Take that at the desk with the papers pushed aside, and know it is not me making peace with a blank, it is what is written. The not knowing where it goes is the description of the thing and not a gap in your attention to it. John 3:8 rules out the chart by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves as He wills, and He did not leave a folder for a careful man to have found by fifty one.
You are not carrying a gap here, and you were never handed a destination to hold. John 3:8 names where it comes from and where it goes and says you can tell neither, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves as He wills, and He owes no chart to a careful man.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
A thing which cannot be scheduled is not a thing which has not yet been understood.
You are not negligent for having no chart, and you were never given a destination to file. John 3:8 names both directions and says you cannot tell either one, and says so of every one born of the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who blows where He wills, and He left no folder for a careful man to find.
That is where eleven years of low grade negligence can go, and it can go tonight, and it does not cost you one page of any other folder.
You have not failed to attend to this. You have attended to it the way you attend to everything, which is the highest form of care you know, and the subject itself is the one Jesus described as unchartable to a serious man who asked.
So take the blank off the list of things you owe.
You cannot tell where it goes, and Jesus said so as the description of every one born of the Spirit. That is John 3:8 read exactly as it stands, and it is the Holy Spirit who blows where He wills, and He does not owe a destination to a planner and is not withholding one out of displeasure.
And I will not tell you to stop planning. That would be a foolish thing to say to a man whose family has been safe for twenty years because of it, and the folders are not the problem and never were.
Only stop auditing yourself for the one folder that was never going to exist. Keep the sound instead. You have heard it, or you would not have been in that chair in April with a sentence you had been carrying for eleven years.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the desk. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over eleven years of quiet self reproach is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your producing the plan, and you will not be producing it. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anything you can map. Where He takes this, and how, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Absence of a plan for this, you are not a fault in me, and I say so in the name of Jesus. John 3:8 says you cannot tell where the wind comes from or where it goes, and so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
- Eleven years of thinking a serious man would have worked this out by now, you were drawn from a standard that does not apply here. It is written that Jesus named both directions and said you cannot tell either one, and His Spirit blows where He wills, and He gave that answer to a serious man on purpose.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You give birth by Your Spirit. I read John 3:8 out loud at this desk and I say the not knowing is the description, and I am not going to start working out what to do with it.
John 3:8
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