The License in the Drawer

Second drawer down, on the left side of the dresser, under the hospital bracelet she never threw away and a watch that stopped in the second year and a rubber band around a stack of receipts nobody is ever going to need.

The card is in there. Laminated, with her photograph on it from when her face was rounder, and a printed date across the bottom that came and went while she was in bed.

Beverly trained for six years to get that card. Two degrees, eleven hundred supervised hours, a licensing examination she took twice, and the first one she failed by four points and cried in a parking garage about. She was a clinical social worker for nine years after that, and she was good, and she has a box in the closet with cards in it from people whose worst year she sat inside with them.

Then her body stopped cooperating. Not all at once. It took about eight months to go from tired to unable, and about two more years for anybody to give it a name, and by then the shape of her life had already been decided by it.

The registration required continuing education hours. She could not sit up for ninety minutes, let alone drive to a conference center and be a professional at people for two days. So the hours did not get done, and the renewal did not get filed, and the date on the card arrived and went past.

She was not even conscious of it happening. She found out three months later, opening mail on the bed, and she remembers exactly what she felt, which was nothing at all for about ten seconds and then a kind of quiet closing sound somewhere behind her sternum.

That was the day she decided what it meant.

Nobody told her. There was no voice. She simply read the expired date the way you would read a verdict, and she filed it under God has moved on and given that work to somebody else, and she shut the drawer.

She has some capacity back now. Not all of it, and probably not all of it ever. But some. She has four or five decent hours on a good day and she spends them on laundry and the phone and a program on the television, and there is a whole shape of a life sitting on the other side of a drawer she does not open.

If you have a card like that, or a certificate, or a set of initials you used to be allowed to put after your name, then come and sit with me. You are a person who read a state's paperwork as though it were the mind of God, and Romans 11:29 says something about His gifts and His calling that no board anywhere has the authority to overrule, and the Holy Spirit has kept that calling on you through every one of the years you could not work.

Without repentance means without a change of mind

Here is the anchor, and it is eight words long.

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.Romans 11:29

Let me clear the older English out of the way first, because it trips almost everyone.

Without repentance here does not mean that God has nothing to be sorry about. That is not what the word is doing. In this older English, repentance carries the sense of a change of mind, and the sentence is saying that God does not have one about this. He does not issue a gift and then reconsider. He does not call a person and then quietly move the file.

And note where Paul writes it. He is in the middle of an argument in Romans 11 about God's dealings with Israel, which is the largest and hardest case of an apparent cancellation anywhere in Scripture, the one every reader of that letter would have thrown at him. And in the middle of that argument, that is the sentence he reaches for. Not as poetry. As the load-bearing wall.

If it holds there, it holds in your bedroom.

You have a calling on you that has never once been withdrawn, because it is written in Romans 11:29 that the gifts and calling of God come without a change of mind, and the same Spirit who put that calling in you has not lifted His hand off it for a single day of those years.

Nothing about a lapsed date is a communication from heaven. It is a communication from an administrative body about an administrative requirement, and it is telling the truth about its own subject and saying absolutely nothing about yours.

A license and a calling are two different objects

Now let me be a teacher for a moment, because this distinction is where your whole peace is sitting.

A license is a permission. It is issued by a board of human beings, it has conditions and hours and a date, it is renewable, it is revocable, and it exists to protect the public, which is a good and serious purpose. I am not going to tell you the card does not matter. It matters. It has a real function and there are excellent reasons a state asks for it.

A calling is not that. Nobody on any board handed it to you and nobody on any board has the power to expire it. It did not come with hours attached. It was given, and Romans 11:29 says that what God gives in this category He gives without a change of mind afterward.

You have been treating those two objects as one object. That is the whole error, and it is a completely understandable one, because for nine years they lived in the same place and did the same work and it was impossible to feel the seam between them.

Now, two things I have to say carefully, because this is the category where writers get careless and hurt people.

The first. You are not restored because you become useful again. That is backwards, and it would put you straight back onto the treadmill you just fell off. God restores the person, and the work follows the person out into the world afterward. The person is never justified by the work. If nothing outward ever changes, the restoration going on in you is still real, and He is not measuring you by your output.

The second. If your capacity is genuinely less than it was, then it is less. I am not going to write one sentence suggesting that enough determination would close that gap, because that is not true and you would know it was not true and you would rightly stop trusting anything else on this page. Four hours is four hours. The calling does not require you to pretend they are ten.

And the word this whole site turns on. He is not issuing you a replacement calling because the first one timed out. There was never a second one on file. He is restoring the woman the calling was given to, and the calling is still exactly where He put it.

You are still carrying the thing He gave you, and it is written in Romans 11:29 that He does not reconsider what He gives, and the Holy Spirit has been guarding that in you across six years and one closed drawer.