Your Old Life Is the Assignment

We’re at the part of the book where I’m supposed to tell you what to do with the rest of your life, and I want to warn you that the answer is not going to be what you were hoping for.

You were hoping for somewhere else.

Everybody is. It’s the whole appeal of a fresh start. A new town, a clean slate, a room where nobody has the file on you. If God has something for a man at sixty-one, surely it’s somewhere his history isn’t standing in the corner.

I’ve got two stories and they both say the opposite, and once you see the pattern you can’t unsee it.

Matthew throws a party.

He gets up from the tax booth, and the very first thing recorded about his new life is that he opens his house and fills it with tax collectors.

His people. His old network. The men he’d been sitting with in the collection business, the ones a decent person in that town crossed the street to avoid.

Not a new circle. Not better company. The exact contact list he had every reason to be ashamed of turned out to be the only thing he brought with him that nobody else in that group had.

Peter could bring fishermen. Matthew could bring the other kind, and there was no other door into that room, and the door was made out of the thing he’d have deleted if he could.

John gets sent to Samaria.

You remember him. He’s the one who asked permission to call down fire on a Samaritan village.

Some years later, word gets to Jerusalem that Samaria has received the gospel, and the apostles send two men to go and see about it.

Peter and John.

He went back into Samaritan country on purpose and prayed for them.

And Peter feeds sheep.

On the beach, after three questions at a rebuilt fire, the assignment he gets is the care of people. Look after them. Feed them.

Given to the man whose entire résumé at that moment was folding under pressure in front of a servant girl.

Three men, three assignments, and every single one is made out of the material of the failure.

The collaborator gets the collaborators. The man who wanted to burn a Samaritan village gets sent to Samaria. The man who broke gets the broken.

That is not irony. It’s the method.

And once you understand why, you’ll stop waiting for a different one.

Here’s why.

You have credibility in exactly one place, and it’s the place you’d never volunteer for.

Somebody who has never lost anything cannot say one useful word to a person who is losing everything. They can be kind. They can bring a casserole. They cannot get in the boat, because they have never been in the boat, and the person drowning can tell within about four sentences.

You can get in the boat.

That is not a consolation prize and I’m not dressing up your worst years as a gift. Those years cost what they cost and nothing here makes the bill smaller.

I’m telling you what the currency is. The only thing anybody has ever been able to hand a person in trouble is the fact of having been there. Everything else is decoration.

You have spent twenty years believing your history disqualifies you from being useful. It is the qualification. It’s the only one that’s ever been operative, and it is the one thing about you that cannot be acquired by anybody younger, more successful, or more put together.

Now let me connect this to the thing you told yourself back in chapter eight.

You said you had nothing left to give.

You were counting like Philip. And I asked you to write the other column and you probably wrote something about being handy or knowing how to work.

Here’s what you left off, same as he did.

You know what it’s like.

You know what the second year of a divorce feels like, not the first. You know what it’s like to sit in a truck in a parking lot for twenty minutes before you can go in. You know what it costs to be the one everybody stopped calling. You know the specific loneliness of being in a building full of people who like you and cannot be told the truth.

That knowledge is worth more than every credential in this county and there is exactly one way to get it.

And here is the part that I need you to hear, because you’re sixty-one and you’ve been told your best years are behind you by a culture that worships thirty-four.

That inventory only gets bigger. It’s the one asset in your life that has been compounding the entire time you thought you were losing ground. A man of thirty-five cannot do this work. He doesn’t have the material yet. He hasn’t lived long enough to be useful to anybody in real trouble.

You have more to give than you did at forty. Not less. More, and the reason is the exact stretch of years you’d erase if somebody offered.

One caution, because I’ve watched this go wrong.

This is not a call to go into ministry, and it’s not a call to make your damage your identity.

I’m not telling you to start a group or get a title or turn your worst decade into a talk. Some people do that and some of them do it well, and a lot of them get stuck being the guy whose whole personality is what happened to him in 2011.

What I’m describing is smaller and quieter and it usually happens one person at a time, in a truck, at a job site, at a kitchen table, over coffee that goes cold.

The assignment is not a role. I told you in the first pages this book wasn’t going to hand you a position, and I meant it.

The assignment is that when somebody in your specific kind of trouble shows up in front of you, you are the one in the room who does not flinch, because you have been there and you know it’s survivable, and you can say so and mean it.

That’s the job. All of it. You already have every qualification.

Here’s your move.

Name the room.

Not the room you’d like to be useful in. The one where your history is an asset instead of a liability. Be specific about it.

Divorced people in their fifties who are two years in and not talking to anybody. People who used to be somebody at a church and aren’t. The ones who drank through a decade. Owners who lost the business. Parents whose kids are civil and nothing more. People who got out of ministry and can’t explain to anybody why.

Whatever your room is, you know it. You knew it three chapters ago.

Write down the name of one person who’s in it right now.

You don’t have to do anything with the name yet. That’s the last chapter.

Just write it down, and notice that you knew it immediately, and notice that you’ve been carefully not thinking about them for a while.

Matthew’s first act as a free man was to set a table for the people he used to be one of.

He didn’t preach at them. Scripture doesn’t record him saying a word that night.

He just made sure they were in the room.