Always in March

Wes asked me again this spring, and it took me nine years to notice the pattern.

He is forty-four. He farms about three hundred acres that his father farmed and his grandfather rented, and he is genuinely good at it, and he reads more Scripture in a week than most men I know read in a quarter. He is the man in that county you ring at eleven at night if something has gone badly wrong in your family, and about six people have done exactly that.

And every so often he sits on a tailgate with me and says a version of the same thing.

"I keep thinking I ought to be doing something with it."

He does not mean he is bored. That is the thing people get wrong about Wes. He means that a man who has been given as much understanding as he has been given ought, in fairness, to be putting it somewhere official, and that driving a tractor with it in his head feels like keeping good seed in a bag.

This year he said it again, in the rain, with the flask going cold between us, and I finally said the thing I ought to have said years ago.

"Wes. Do you know when you ask me this?"

He said what do you mean.

I said, "You have asked me this nine times, and every single one of them has been in March."

He did not say anything.

"It is always March. It is always when the ground is too wet to get on and there is nothing you can do about it and you have been in that house looking out that window for eleven days."

He turned the flask cup round in his hands a bit.

Then he said, "That is not nothing, though. Even if it is March."

And I said, "No. It is not nothing. It might be God. I am not going to sit here and tell you it is only the weather, because I do not know, and if you go, I will be in the second row on the first Sunday. All I am saying is you have never once asked me this in June."

Now let me ask you the same question, because you have a March.

Maybe it is the third week of January. Maybe it is the Sunday evening after a good service where somebody said something about calling and you drove home with your hands tight on the wheel. Maybe it is any time you are ill enough to be off work for three days and have time to think.

And the thought that arrives is that the ordinary thing you do is beneath what God has put in you.

The ambition He actually named

Paul writes to a church that was full of excitement and gives them an instruction that sounds like an anticlimax until you look at the verb.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Make it your ambition. That is a strong word and Paul uses it deliberately. It is the word for striving after honor, the thing a man competes for. He takes the language of ambition and points it at a quiet life, your own business, and your hands.

Not as a consolation for people who could not do better. As the target.

So hear this over you, on the tailgate in the rain. Your ordinary work is the honorable ambition Scripture actually names, and the seed in the bag is not going bad. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who distributes gifts as He wills and who put you where you are on purpose, which means the arrangement you keep apologizing for is His arrangement.

Now let me be honest about the other half, because I would be doing you a disservice otherwise.

Sometimes it is God.

Men do get called out of a trade and into something official, and the calling often starts exactly like this, as a restlessness that will not settle. I have watched it happen four times and every one of those men was right to go. If I told you flatly that your March is only weather, I would be a liar, and I would risk talking a man out of a thing God is genuinely doing.

So here is the honest test, and it is not a clever one.

Does it survive June?

A restlessness that is God tends to keep speaking when your circumstances improve. It follows you into a good week. It gets more specific rather than less, and other people start noticing it independently and saying so without being prompted, and it usually involves somebody putting responsibility on you before you have asked for it.

A restlessness that is dissatisfaction goes quiet the moment the ground dries out.

Both are worth listening to. Only one of them is a call.

And underneath either answer, this stands: you are not currently wasting anything. The Word says whatever you do, do it from the soul as for the Lord, and it makes no distinction between the tractor and the pulpit in the value of the doing. The Spirit of God is in that cab with you, and He has not been waiting nine years for you to get somewhere more suitable so that He can begin.

Let me guard the pulpit too, since I have spent this message defending the tractor.

Nothing here is a swipe at anybody in ministry. It is real work, it is hard, and the people who do it well pay for it in ways nobody sees. If God takes you there, go, and go quickly.

The only lie in the room is the ranking. There is not a league table, and the man who invented it was not Paul.

There was a man five hundred years ago who put it as bluntly as it can be put: that a shoemaker serves God at his last, and a maid sweeping serves Him with her broom, and that these are not lesser than the work of a priest but the same work under a different roof. He had been a monk. He knew exactly what he was giving up when he said it.