Every single time she has heard it explained, it has been explained the same way.
You are at a crossroads. You have got a decision you cannot see the far side of. A job, a move, a person, a diagnosis, a thing you need God to say something about. So you set aside the food and you seek His face and you get your answer.
She has heard that in three churches and two conferences and a book somebody put in her hand at a women's day, and she has never once heard it explained any other way.
And she does not have a crossroads. That is the problem she brought to her kitchen table on Tuesday night with a cup of tea she let go cold. Her life is fine. Her marriage is steady. The kids are in the schools they are in. Nothing is pending. Nothing is being decided. There is no fork in any road anywhere in front of her.
So what is it for, then. If it is a tool for crossroads and you are not standing at one, is the whole thing simply not addressed to you.
She has wanted to ask that out loud for about four years.
If you are on a road with no fork in it and you have been quietly assuming that puts you outside of all this, come and sit down. Nothing is going to be asked of you here.
Read the verse everybody quotes, and read the first six words
This is the passage. Every guidance sermon you have ever heard on this subject came out of it, and the sermon is usually built on the second half of the sentence.
As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.Acts 13:2
Now read the first six words. As they ministered to the Lord.
That is what those men were doing. That is the entire activity described. They were ministering to God, which is an old and beautiful phrase that means serving Him, waiting on Him, giving Him what He is owed, attending to Him the way you attend to a person you love and not to a switchboard.
The Holy Spirit spoke into the middle of it. Read it again and see it: the speaking is an interruption. They were not there to get a sending. They were there for Him, and He interrupted them, and Luke wrote both things down in one sentence and put the ministering first.
You have a God who is worth attending to when nothing whatsoever is being decided. Acts 13:2 puts the ministering first and the guidance second, in that order, in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a woman with a fine life and a cold cup of tea see the difference.
What she has actually been handed is a tool, and that is why it will not fit
Here is why four years of quietly wondering has not resolved itself, and it is not her fault.
A tool is for a job. If you hand somebody a tool and no job comes up, they put it in a drawer and feel vaguely guilty about it. That is exactly where she is, and it is exactly where a lot of people are, and it happened because the thing was handed over as an instrument for producing outcomes rather than as a way of being with God.
And once you have it as a tool, you cannot use it without a job, and you cannot want it for its own sake, and there is nowhere for a settled week to go.
But turn it the other way and the whole thing opens up. If it is a way of praying, then it fits an ordinary Tuesday exactly as well as it fits a crossroads. Better, honestly, because on a Tuesday there is nothing in the room competing with God for what you are actually there about.
You are wanted for company and not only for consultation, and you were before your life ever settled down. That is Psalm 27:8, not a nice thought I am offering you, and His Spirit is what turns a verse about seeking His face into something a woman can do with nothing pending.
The paragraph that outranks the whole teaching
Before another word, the thing that outranks everything above it.
Some people must not go without food, and there is no asterisk on that. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer stand. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one.
And the quiet of it is about audience and never about hiding. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is ordinary courtesy. None of it fails anything.
You have been fully inside everything on this page, and you were never on the edge of it because of what your body cannot do. Scripture settled that long before you got here, where God receives according to what a person has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been distributed on medical advice.
If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.
So here is the turn, and it lands on a Tuesday with nothing pending.
You are not sitting outside the door because your life has gone quiet, and you have not been benched. He promised it, in the words about ministering to the Lord in Acts 13:2, where the attending is the activity and the sending was the interruption, and His Spirit does not require a crossroads before He will spend an evening with you.
Four years of wondering was not wasted, either. The question was the right question. It was the only answer she had been given that was too small, and it was too small from the start, and nobody handed her a better one because most of the people who handed it to her had only ever been handed the same thing.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice, wherever you are standing. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ and it does not depend on having a decision in front of you. Scripture is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely willing, and what God says into any week of yours, and when, is His, however He answers.
- Idea that this is only for crossroads, you are small and you are not the truth about me. Those men in Acts were ministering to the Lord and the sending came in as an interruption, and Luke wrote the ministering down first. In the name of Jesus I am taking this out of the drawer.
- Four years of thinking I was outside it, you are over and you are not God's word about me. The question was right and the answer I was given was too small, and His Spirit is settling that in me at this table tonight. I was never benched, I was only mislabeled.
- Father, You are worth attending to on a week when nothing at all is happening. I thank You that You never once made a crisis the price of admission to Your company. Here is an evening with no question in it, and I am spending it on You.
Acts 13:2
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