Somebody Asked What She Wants

It happened three times in one evening, which is why she noticed.

Camille was at a table with six people, and one of them, a woman she likes, asked what she is going to do now.

And Camille said, "Anything that isn't like the last nine years."

Laughter. Fair enough. Ten minutes later somebody else asked what kind of work she was looking at, and she said, "Something where nobody calls me on a Sunday."

And then, at the door, coats on, the woman she likes asked one more time, gently, and Camille said, "Honestly? I just want a quiet life."

Three questions. Three answers. And every one of them was a description of what she is running from.

She noticed in the car. She sat in a parking lot with the engine off and ran the evening back and heard herself say all three, and understood that she has been doing it since March and probably longer.

She is thirty-nine. She came out of an arrangement that had her name on everything and her interests in nothing, and it ended, and the ending was right, and she is out.

Here is what has happened since. Everybody keeps asking her what she wants, and she keeps handing them the negative of a photograph.

Here is the day it caught.

Her niece, twenty-two and unencumbered by tact, said, "You always say what you don't want. What do you actually want?"

And Camille said, "I want peace."

And her niece said, "That's the same answer again."

You know that. Somebody asks about your future and what comes out is a boundary rather than a direction, and you have been doing it long enough that it sounds, to your own ear, like an answer.

The knowing is on His side

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what to want. I do not know your life. I am not going to give you a verdict on the nine years, and I am not going to tell you what God is preparing, because I do not know it and inventing it would be a cheap thing to do with somebody else's future.

What I will do is read you the most quoted verse in the modern church and point at the word everybody skates over.

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.Jeremiah 29:11

I know.

Not: you will know. Not: seek and you will find out. The verse opens with God stating what He knows, and the entire content of it is on His side of the sentence.

Read who has the information there. He has the thoughts. He knows the thoughts. He thinks them toward a specific people. The people being addressed are, at that moment, in Babylon, seventy years from the end of it, and they are told exactly nothing about the shape of what is coming. They are told that somebody else knows.

You are not the one required to hold the picture, and the verse puts the knowing entirely on His side. Jeremiah 29:11 says I know rather than you will know, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a parking lot with the engine off.

And notice the last phrase: an expected end. Older translations render it a hope and a future, and both are getting at the same idea, which is an outcome that is anticipated by somebody. Anticipated by whom? By the One doing the knowing.

You have a future that is already anticipated, and the anticipating is being done by somebody other than you. It is written that He thinks thoughts of peace toward them to give an expected end, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient intention a present possession.

A boundary is not a direction

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Camille's three answers were not evasions. Every one of them was true and every one of them was hard won. Nobody calls me on a Sunday is a sentence with nine years in it, and a woman who has learned that sentence has learned something real and expensive.

I am not taking her boundaries away from her, and if this article makes anybody feel foolish for having them, I have failed.

You are not being corrected for knowing what you will not go back to, and Scripture never once treats a hard-won limit as a failure of vision. Proverbs 4:23 says keep thy heart with all diligence as an instruction rather than a concession, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a boundary from being mistaken for a smallness.

But here is the thing about a boundary. It tells you where the wall is. It does not tell you where the door is. A person can know every wall in a building and still have no idea which way they are walking, and after long enough the walls start to feel like a map.

And that is exactly what has happened. Three answers in one evening, all of them accurate, none of them pointing anywhere.

You have been describing walls to people who were asking about a door, and those are two different questions. Jeremiah 29:11 speaks of an expected end rather than of an avoided one, and the Holy Spirit is what shows a person the difference when they can no longer hear it in their own answers.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the months since March have gone somewhere heavier than uncertain, or if a quiet life has started to mean less life rather than a better one, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your niece, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about the nine years. That is me refusing to leave you in that parking lot by yourself.