For the one who has been pricing a favor she has never actually costed.
Picture a hook by a back door with two keys on it, and a strip of masking tape under the second one with a name written on it in biro.
The name belongs to a woman four doors down who is having a boiler replaced. She asked, at the school gate, slightly awkwardly, whether there was any chance somebody could be in on Tuesday, because she cannot get the time off and the engineer needs eight hours.
The woman who owns the hook said she would think about it. That was Thursday. It is now Sunday evening and the key is still on the hook and nothing has been said either way.
She isn't unwilling. She spent nine years coordinating a welcome team and could organize this in her sleep, and she's already worked out that the spare room in that house has a plug for a laptop.
That's the part she hasn't admitted to herself. A woman who has mentally located a power socket in somebody else's house has not been weighing whether to do it. She's been planning how.
What has stopped her is that she cannot work out what it would cost, and she cannot work out what it would cost because she has never once tried to price it.
The cost is one Tuesday morning of your own, and liberty means that morning was always yours to spend. The written word calls you to liberty first, and the Spirit has left the spending of it with you.
Price It Properly
Do the arithmetic. You have carried a vague expense since Thursday, and vague expense is always larger than measured expense.
Eight hours in a house four doors down. You'd take a laptop, and you work from home on Tuesdays anyway, which means the actual cost is a change of room rather than a lost day of your life.
Add the awkwardness of a stranger's kitchen, the fact that you would not want to use her kettle or her mugs, and the need to be polite to an engineer for eight hours. That is real and it is not nothing.
Set against that: a woman gets a boiler before winter. She doesn't lose a day's pay over it, and she doesn't have to ask six other people first and be turned down by each of them in turn.
Measured expense is always smaller than vague expense, and you never measured it. The written word leaves the spending to you, and the Spirit has kept her name on a strip of tape since Thursday.
Called Unto Liberty
Here's the verse, and the first clause is about what belongs to you.
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.Galatians 5:13 (KJV)
Called unto liberty. Your Tuesday is your own. That is the starting position, stated plainly, and it means nobody has a claim on that morning that you have not chosen to grant.
Which is precisely what makes the giving of it worth something. A morning that was never yours cannot be given away at all, and the whole force of this depends on the fact that you could keep it and are choosing not to.
That is why an allocated Tuesday never felt like much. It was already spent before you woke up, and a day that arrives already spent cannot be handed to anybody, however willingly you turn up for it.
Paul wrote that to believers who had spent years being told which of their days belonged to whom, and it reaches past them to a hook by a back door with two keys on it.
A morning that was never yours could not be given away at all. The written word establishes that it is yours, and the Spirit leaves the choosing with you.
What the Rota Used to Decide
Name what has actually gone missing. You have the willingness and you have the capability, so it is neither of those.
For nine years, the cost question was answered in advance. A list said Tuesday, and Tuesday was therefore spent, and there was no calculation to perform because somebody else had performed it.
That's a genuine convenience and losing it is disorienting. You are now required to do something you haven't done since your twenties, which is to decide for yourself what a day of your own life is worth to somebody else.
Nobody warns you about that part. People leaving a role expect to miss the work and the company. Almost nobody expects to find that a small ordinary decision has become unfamiliar enough to stall them for four days.
That decision feels enormous because it is unfamiliar rather than because it is difficult. Make it four or five times and it will take about ninety seconds each time, the way it used to.
The decision feels enormous because it is unfamiliar rather than because it is hard. The written word hands that judgment to you, and the Spirit is at work inside the deciding.
I Am Not Telling You to Say Yes to Everything
Be careful, because a woman with your history can be talked into a great deal and should not be.
You are allowed to say no. Liberty includes it, and it is not a lesser use of the freedom. A person who cannot decline has not got freedom at all. They have got a new rota with no list attached to it, which is considerably worse than the old one.
Nor am I telling you this particular yes is obviously right. Price it, look at your week, and if it does not work, say so kindly on Monday and she will ask somebody else.
What I want off you is the not deciding. Not the caution. Not the right to refuse.
You Already Wrote the Name
Here's the turn, and it is on the masking tape.
Somebody cut a strip of tape, wrote a stranger's name on it in biro, stuck it under a hook, and hung a key on it. That is not the act of a person who has not decided.
A woman who was genuinely undecided would have put the key in a drawer. She would have left it in her coat, or on the side, or wherever an object goes when the matter behind it has not been resolved yet.
You labeled it. You gave it a place on a hook beside your own back door key, which is where a household keeps the keys it uses, and you did that on Thursday within an hour of being asked.
You labeled it and hung it beside your own key, which is not what undecided looks like. The written word left the choosing to you, and the Spirit had you make it on Thursday.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
The ground under this is Christ rather than your run of good weeks. He lives in you, the Spirit carries agreement, and the outcome is left where it has always been.
Say it once and do not repeat it.
The cost is one Tuesday morning of my own, and liberty means that morning was always mine to spend. Scripture says that I have been called to liberty, and that by love I am to serve one another, which makes the morning mine first and the giving of it a real gift rather than an allocation. The Spirit leaves the choosing with me. I am not failing to decide any more. Within an hour of being asked I cut a strip of tape, wrote a neighbor's name on it, and hung her key beside my own so a repair worker could be let in, which is not what undecided looks like. I put the key in my coat.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Galatians 5:13
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
