The Peg at the End of the Rail

There is a rail of coat pegs on the wall of the drivers' room at Kev's depot, and every peg but one has a strip of masking tape above it with a name on in marker pen.

Bez. Andy. Little Andy. Sue. Baz. A furred, graying strip that says Dot, and nobody currently in that room has any idea who Dot was.

The tape is old. Somebody's biro went through it once and it got covered over with more tape, so a couple of the names sit slightly proud of the wall.

The last peg on the rail has never had tape on it. That is where Kev hangs his coat.

He has been hanging it there four years.

Nobody is being unkind to him. That has to be said straight away, because it is the part that makes the whole thing so hard to explain to anybody. The lads are fine. Baz brings him a coffee on a Monday. Sue asked after his mum for eight straight months when his mum was poorly. If Kev said out loud, I have not got a peg, somebody would have a strip of tape up there inside a minute and would think nothing of it.

He is agency, which is why. Four years of agency at the same depot, same gate, same bay, and the tape is for the ones on the books.

So he hangs his coat on the bare peg at the end and goes and does his shift, and it is fine, and it is not what this is about.

Here is what it is about.

For six years the plot of Kev's life was simple. Get through today without picking up. That was it, and that was enough, and it filled a day right to the edges. There was a thing to do every single morning and a way to know at eleven o'clock at night whether he had done it.

Then somewhere in the third year the fight went out of it. Not the discipline. The fight. It stopped being a war and became just a fact about him, the way being right-handed is a fact, and there was no eleven o'clock verdict any more because there was nothing being contested.

And nothing moved into the space.

He is not in trouble. He wants that on the record. There is no crisis, no debt, no bad company, nothing anybody could point at and say, there, that. He has a shift, a flat, a mum he visits, a coat.

He is just not anywhere.

And once a shift, at the end, he stands in front of a rail of other people's names with his coat over his arm, and it takes him about four seconds too long to decide where to put it.

And here is where I stop talking about Kev.

Because you are not in trouble either. You have been waiting for something to be wrong so that there would be something to fix, and nothing is wrong, and that is the whole problem.

Somebody put you there

I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down. I will plant them and not uproot them.Jeremiah 24:6

Read the verbs in Jeremiah 24:6 before you read anything else. Set. Bring. Build. Plant. Every one of them has God as the subject and a person as the object, and not one of them asks the person for anything at all. That was said over people who were a very long way from where they started, and He does not, in that verse, explain one thing to them about how they came to be there. He does not offer a reason. He tells them what His own hands do. You are being spoken to in exactly that grammar, and the Holy Spirit has not attached a condition to it any more than Jeremiah did.

You have been advised, by people who like you, to find something. Get a project. Get some structure into the week. Join a thing. There is nothing wrong with any of that, and it is not what is written here. Psalm 16:5 says the Lord Himself is my portion and my cup, and then it says, You hold my lot. The word behind lot is the pebble they cast to divide up land, and the psalm has God holding it in His own hand rather than throwing it, and the Spirit is not standing behind you with a map and a disappointed expression.

The Holy Spirit is doing something under your feet at this minute that has nothing whatever to do with a plan, and the ground under it is 1 Corinthians 12:18: God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, just as He chose. Each one of them. Not the notable ones, not the ones with a strip of tape. He chose, and He arranged, and you were placed by somebody who had the whole body in front of Him when He did it.

Acts 17:26 says He determined the appointed times and the boundaries of where people live. Boundaries. Somebody drew a line round the town you are actually in, and it was not the agency, it was not chance, and it was not the last thing that went wrong in your life. You are standing inside a boundary that was set on purpose, and the Spirit is holding that over a man in a drivers' room with his coat over his arm.

Now here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to ask you to decide anything by the end of this. There is no direction to pick and no plan to have made by Sunday night, because being planted is a standing and it is not a strategy. You are already placed. Every verb in Jeremiah 24:6 belongs to God, and the Holy Spirit has never once made a man's place conditional on his working out what he is for.

So the question was never where you ought to be. That question has kept you standing at the end of a rail with a coat over your arm and it has never once returned an answer. The question is who put you where you are, and the word says God did it Himself, and His Spirit is not asking you to find your feet. He is telling you what is under them.

And if these four years have not been four years, if last night went the way the old nights went, then read this line before anybody else does. Nothing in Jeremiah 24:6 is a reward for a good run. The planting there was done to people with nothing whatever to show for themselves, and the Holy Spirit did not plant you on a day you passed and does not uproot you on a day you did not.