Waiting to Feel Qualified

There is a loft over the old dairy at the back of Adele's place, up an outside stair with a rail worn smooth. Adele works up there. Wool everywhere, a loom under a dust sheet when it is idle, one window at the west end that turns the whole room amber for about forty minutes in the evening.

In March she cut Bess a key and put it in her hand and said, "It is yours. Come and work whenever you want. You do not have to ask me and you do not have to knock."

Bess came almost every week from March to September.

She never went up.

She came in the back way, sat at the kitchen table, had her tea, admired what Adele had brought down, asked good questions about the warp. Then she drove home. Twenty-six weeks of that, with the key on her ring the whole time, next to the car key, going up and down the stairs of her own house in her pocket.

When Adele asked, Bess had an answer ready every time, and it was always some version of the same one.

"When I am actually a weaver."

Because using that room felt like something a person had to become first. Anybody can sit in a kitchen. Going up meant walking into a room where the work happens and standing in it as though you belonged there, and Bess did not feel like somebody who belonged there, and she was honest enough not to fake it.

On a Thursday in September, Adele put down her tea, said, "Come on then," and walked out the back door.

Bess followed her across the yard. Up the outside stair, both of them, Adele in front. And at the top Adele put her hand on the handle, opened the door, and then stepped aside and stood against the rail with her arms folded and waited.

Bess stood on the top step for a while.

Then she went in.

And it was just a room. That was the thing. Warm from the afternoon, smelling of lanolin and dust, the light coming in level and gold through the west window and lying in a long stripe across the boards, the loom under its sheet like a horse under a blanket.

Bess said, "I have been standing at the bottom of those stairs since March."

Adele laughed at her. "The key was in your hand in March. You have been waiting on a feeling to hand you what a sentence already handed you."

And Bess laughed too, and stood in the middle of the stripe of light with her hands loose at her sides, and did not go back down for two hours.

And you have a door like that.

Not a loft. Yours. The thing the covenant says is already yours that you have never once reached for, because reaching for it felt like claiming to be somebody you have not become yet.

The feeling was never the key

Let me say the honest thing first, because Bess deserves it and so do you.

She was not being falsely modest. There is a kind of person who says she does not feel qualified in order to be told otherwise, and Bess is not that person and neither, I think, are you. She genuinely could not square standing in that room with what she knew about herself, and she was too straight to walk in pretending.

That is not a small scruple. It is a decent instinct pointed at the wrong object.

So here is the ground, and it goes right here in the teaching. One half of this covenant is what God granted, and that half is finished, granted in the past tense, and no feeling of yours moves it a millimeter in either direction. The other half is your response, which here is simply to take hold, and it is real, and it is asked of you, and it is not what makes the thing yours in the first place.

Right now, as you read, what the covenant gives you is already given and it is not pending review. That is not a compliment I am paying you. 2 Peter 1:4 uses a past tense verb about it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a past tense verb feel like a key in the hand rather than a line in a letter.

By which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature.2 Peter 1:4

Read the tense He used

He has granted. Not He offers, not He is considering, not He grants to those who reach the standard.

Look one verse earlier and it is the same construction again: his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness. Twice in two sentences, past tense, done, on record.

That is what a granting clause is. It is not a description of God's willingness. It is the moment a thing changes hands, and once it has changed hands, the only question left is whether the person holding it knows.

You have been holding a key since long before this morning and the holding did not depend on how qualified you felt while you held it. Scripture put that in the perfect tense on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who keeps pressing the point until a woman looks down at her own hand.

What is actually in the clause

Now let me be careful here, because this is the place where a page like this can start promising things it has no business promising, and I will not do that to you.

What the document gives is not a set of circumstances. It is not a guarantee about how your year goes. Nobody here is going to tell you what is coming, because nobody here knows, and a covenant is not a forecast.

What is named is named. Access, for one.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

With confidence. That word is about the manner of the approach, and it is the manner Bess could not manage on the stair. It is not a feeling being commanded of you either; it is a description of what is now appropriate, the way walking straight into a room is appropriate once the key is yours.

You were granted a way in that does not open and close according to your estimate of yourself, and Hebrews 4:16 is where that is written down in plain sight, and the Spirit is the one who moves a person's foot off the bottom step.

And the taking hold is real

Something is asked of you here and it is not nothing.

Bess had to go up the stairs. Adele opened the door and stood aside, and even then somebody had to walk through it, and Adele was never going to carry her.

That is your half and it is genuinely yours. Take hold. Say out loud what belongs to you and then act like it belongs to you. It is a real term, and a woman who never reaches has not lost the grant, but she has spent twenty-six weeks in a kitchen with the key in her pocket.

You have the taking hold to do, and His word supplies the ground you take hold of, and His Spirit supplies the nerve, which means even your half of this is not being done alone. That is the difference between an inheritance and an exam.