The First Ninety Seconds

Iona has said for now at the end of that sentence for eleven years.

"I am at the housing office. For now."

She took it to pay for a course. That was the actual plan, and it was a good plan, and there is a box under her bed with the materials in it, and she has not opened it since 2019.

So you would expect this to be a story about a wasted decade, and it is not, and that is why I am telling you.

Iona is extraordinary at the first ninety seconds of a phone call.

Not the whole call. The first ninety seconds, when somebody rings who has been passed around four times, whose ceiling has been coming down since March, who has rehearsed a furious speech in a corridor and is now delivering it at volume to a woman who did not cause any of it.

And within about a minute and a half, that person is breathing differently.

She does not know how she does it. She would tell you there is nothing to it. There is something to it: she does not defend the department in the first minute, she never says I understand because she has learned that particular phrase enrages people, she asks one specific question about the actual room, and she says the person's name once, early, and not again.

Eleven years. Thousands of calls.

Her manager put her on new starters in the spring, and a girl of twenty-two sat next to her with a headset on and listened to four calls and then said:

"How do you do that?"

And Iona said, "Do what?"

And the girl said, "That man was screaming. He was actually screaming. And now he is telling you about his son."

And Iona said, "Oh. I do not know. You just, sort of, do not argue."

And the girl said, "No. There is more to it than that. I have been watching."

Iona thought about that on the bus home for eleven years' worth of minutes.

Because here is what she had never done, not once, in a decade: counted it. It had never entered her head as an ability. It was the placeholder job. It was the thing before the thing.

Now let me ask you how long you have been saying yours.

For now. Just at the moment. It is only until. You have a sentence and it has a tail on it, and the tail has been there through two house moves and a pandemic and however many birthdays.

Work was in the garden before anything went wrong

Go back to the second chapter of Genesis, before there is any curse anywhere, before there is a thorn or a thistle in the story.

Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.Genesis 2:15

Work is here already. It is in the good world, in the good chapter, given to a person by God as part of the arrangement rather than as a penalty for anything.

To cultivate it and keep it. Two verbs. One is about making something grow and one is about guarding what is there. Both of them are what you do all day.

So hear this over you, on the bus home. You were put somewhere on purpose, and the eleven years have not been a corridor between the real parts of your life. That is written down in the chapter before anything went wrong, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who gives skill to people at their work, which He has been doing in you on every one of those calls whether you were counting or not.

Now let me handle the box under the bed honestly, because I am not going to tell you to throw it away and I am not going to tell you to open it tonight either.

You may still do that course.

Some people do, at fifty, at sixty, and it is glorious, and I have no interest in talking anybody out of a thing God is stirring. If it is still there in you, and it is specific, and it will not settle, then take it seriously and talk to somebody who knows you.

The problem was never the box. The problem is the tail on the sentence.

Because for now does something quietly cruel. It tells you, several times a week, in your own voice, that the actual content of your actual life is provisional. And a person who says that for eleven years arrives at forty having never once been present in their own working day.

You did not lose the decade to the housing office. If you lost it to anything, you lost it to a two-word tail.

And look at what was happening while you were not counting. God was making you into somebody who can talk a shouting man down to his own son in ninety seconds. That is not a small thing to be. There are people who do expensive training for it and never get there, and you got there by turning up, and the Spirit of God was in that, because the written word says it is He who gives wisdom and skill and understanding to a person in their craft, and He named a builder and a weaver when He said it.

Let me guard the other flank.

This does not make the housing office your destiny, and it does not oblige you to say you love it. It may well be an ordinary job you are good at and will leave in three years.

It only means that today is not an interval, and that what you are becoming here goes with you wherever you go next.

There was a man five hundred years ago who insisted that God works through what we call ordinary jobs the way a hand works through a glove, and that a person does not need to look for a holier station in order to be doing God's work, because He is already at work in the station they are in.