He Perfects What Concerns You

He would not use the word manager about it out loud, but if you set his prayer life on a page next to a project plan you could not tell them apart.

There are objectives. Three of them, currently, and they have been more or less the same three for about six years: patience with his eldest, the thing about money and worry, and a general heading he thinks of as depth.

There are measures. He knows what progress on each would look like and he could tell you where he is on all three within about a minute.

There is a review. Not formal. But there is a stretch on a Sunday evening where he takes stock of the week, and it functions exactly the way a review functions.

And there is an accountable party, and it is him.

He is fifty-five and he has run large things well for thirty years, and he brought the only competence he has to the most important thing in his life, which is not a stupid thing to have done.

And it has stopped working. Not dramatically. It is just that for about two years the objectives have not moved, and the reviews have all come back the same, and he has begun to have on Sunday evenings the specific feeling of a man managing a project that is not going to deliver and knowing it before anybody else does.

Whose work the perfecting is

David has one line about how the unfinished things in a person get finished, and the subject of the sentence is not the person.

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.Psalm 138:8

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me.

Perfect there means bring to completion. And the one bringing it to completion is named, and it is not David, and David is the one it concerns rather than the one delivering it.

Then read the last clause, because it is the clincher for a man in your line of work. Forsake not the works of thine own hands.

He calls himself the work of God's hands. Not the manager of the work. The work. He is the deliverable in that sentence, and the delivery belongs to Somebody else.

You are the work rather than the one accountable for it. That is not me relieving you of a responsibility you take seriously; Psalm 138:8 puts the perfecting in God's hands and the person in the position of the thing being made, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old line and lays it beside a Sunday evening review.

Why it stopped responding

Now let me say why the method has stalled, because you will want a reason and there is one.

Management works on things that respond to management. Resources, sequences, dependencies, people doing tasks. Apply it well and you get movement, and you have got movement out of it for thirty years because it is a genuinely good discipline.

But you have been applying it to a soul, and a soul is not a work stream. Growth in patience with your eldest is not a deliverable with a critical path. It comes, when it comes, through years and grief and the Spirit doing something you did not schedule, and it very often arrives from a direction that was not on any of your three headings.

So the objectives have not moved in two years, and you have read that as failure to deliver, and it is not that. It is a category that does not take the tool.

You have been managing something that was never a project, and the stall is not a report on you. The written word makes God the one who completes what concerns a person, and the Holy Spirit does not work to a plan a man drew up on a Sunday evening.

And the guardrail, because this is the landing category and I am not going to hand you a system to replace the one I am taking. There is no routine coming. If a flat month arrives after this, it will not be because you stopped managing properly, and I am not going to give you a maintenance schedule that would turn into a fourth objective by next weekend.

You are not the guarantor of your own growth and the next stalled year is not a delivery failure. Scripture gives the perfecting to Him with no clause about the person's method, and the Holy Spirit has been working through two years of reviews that came back the same.