He Offered To Bring Me On And I Said No

It was in September, in a car outside a house neither of them lived in, and it took about four minutes.

His friend runs something real. Not a vanity project, not a platform for one man: a genuine work with people in it who are properly cared for, and a clean set of accounts, and a track record that anybody could look at. He is not naive about it either. He knows what it costs him.

And he offered, generously, without any pressure at all, to bring him onto the team. Salary, the lot. He said, and he meant it, that he had been thinking about it for a year.

He said no. In the car, that evening, without needing to think about it, which is the part that has troubled him ever since.

He has never been able to explain it. Not to his friend, who took it gracefully and has never raised it again. Not to his wife, who asked twice and then stopped. Not to himself, at three in the morning, where he has been over it perhaps two hundred times looking for the reason and has never once found one he would repeat out loud.

So it sits in him as a suspicious no. A no with no paperwork. And four years on he has begun to wonder whether he refused a calling out of fear and dressed it afterward as peace.

If you are carrying a no you cannot account for, come and sit down. That work you turned down is not going to be run down here.

A no does not become fear because it has no paperwork

Let us look at the standard he has been holding himself to, because it is higher than the one the book uses.

He believes a refusal is only legitimate if it can be justified. If he could produce a reason, a good one, one that survived being said out loud to his wife, then the no would be sound. Without the reason, the no is under suspicion, and it has been under suspicion for four years.

But an unexplainable no is not the same as an unfounded one. Those are two different things, and he has been treating them as one because he is an honest man who does not like a gap in his own accounting.

Your no is not evidence against you. Nothing about a refusal you cannot justify has ever made it a refusal made in fear. I am not saying that to spare a man a hard question. Scripture says after they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not (Acts 16:7), which records a redirection with no reason attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man at three in the morning.

A verse with the reason left out

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off the work your friend runs.

Read what the account does and does not supply, because the omission is deliberate and it is the whole comfort.

After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not.Acts 16:7

Bithynia was a reasonable plan. It was a good region, full of people, and there is nothing in the passage suggesting the intention was wrong or that they had been careless in forming it.

And the reason is not given. Not there, not later, not anywhere in the book. Luke, who was a careful man and had access to the people involved, writes down a redirection and leaves the explanation out, as though a redirection did not require one in order to be recorded as real.

Your redirection may stand without an explanation, and Scripture records one exactly that way. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man four years out from a car in September.

Nothing here is against the work you turned down

Something has to be said very plainly, or this becomes a page that quietly justifies him by making his friend's work suspect.

That ministry is good. The people in it are cared for, the accounts are clean, and the man who runs it is carrying something heavy for the sake of other people and has never once used this against him. Turning it down was not a judgment on it and this page is not making one either.

And nothing here says that saying yes would have been the fearful choice or the compromised one. Plenty of people said yes to that same work and were right to.

You are not hiding. Nothing about staying where you were put has ever been a smaller obedience than going somewhere with a name on it. Scripture says he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much (Luke 16:10), where faithfulness is measured by conduct rather than by scale, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a man steady in a place nobody is watching.

You do not need a platform for this to be real. It was given to you, not to an audience. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the giving is not routed through an organization, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a team you did or did not join, who determines where a man is put.

And if these four years have cost more than the friends at that table know, if sleep has gone, if three in the morning has become the worst hour of your day, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.