One Step, Forward, Today

The plan is beautiful. I want you to know I mean that.

It is written down. Some of it is on paper and some of it is in a document she has opened more times than she would admit, and it is not a fantasy, it is a real plan with real steps in it and it would work.

It has been three years and she has never done step one.

And here is the part that has confused her, because she is not a lazy woman and never has been. She raised children. She held things together through a stretch that would have taken most people apart. She is capable, and everybody who knows her would tell you so, and she cannot make herself begin.

She has diagnosed it a dozen ways. Discipline. Time. Energy. She has tried getting up earlier. She has broken it into smaller pieces and then not done the smaller pieces either. She has had two very good conversations about it that made her feel understood for about a week.

Let me tell you what I think it is, and I say it with love, and I say it as somebody who has held a plan like that in my own hands.

The plan is not a plan. It is a proof.

Somewhere under all of it is a question she has never asked out loud: am I still somebody who does things. And the plan is not there to be executed, it is there to answer that question, and that is why it cannot be started. Because the moment step one is taken, the answering begins, and if it goes badly the question comes back with a verdict attached to it.

So the plan sits, complete and untouched, and it is safest exactly where it is.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Not a detail. I do not need it and this message runs perfectly well without it.

What I want is step one.

Paul does one thing, and it is not a plan

Philippians 3 is a chapter where a man takes stock of his own life, and what he says he does is much smaller than what you would expect from him.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.Philippians 3:13

Start with the first clause, because everybody hurries past it. I count not myself to have apprehended. He has not arrived. He says so, plainly, in writing, at the end of a life you would think had arrived if anybody's had.

Which means the arriving was never the requirement. That alone takes something off a person.

Then: this one thing I do. Not these seven things. Not a plan. One thing, and it is present tense, and it is happening now rather than being scheduled.

And then the one thing is described with two participles: forgetting what is behind, reaching forth to what is before. Reaching forth is a runner's word. It is the body already stretched toward the line, weight forward, committed, before the finish is anywhere near.

Here is what that hands you. You are not required to have arrived before you move, and Philippians 3:13 has the man himself saying he has not apprehended and then reaching anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person who has been standing beside a complete plan for three years.

Notice what is not in that verse. There is no five year horizon in it. There is no assessment of capability, no inventory of what is left, no evaluation of whether this person is still somebody who does things. There is a body reaching forward, today, and that is the whole of the instruction.

And the forgetting is not amnesia. Paul remembers his own history in detail; he has just listed it in that same chapter. Forgetting there means ceasing to take your reckoning from it, which is exactly what a person does who has quietly made one hard year the measure of what she is now capable of.

You are already moving in Him rather than waiting to qualify, and Philippians 3:13 puts the whole thing in one present tense verb, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding anything from you until the plan has been proved.