Not Knowing Where He Was Going

Rob has had a plan since he was nineteen and he cannot produce one now and it is frightening him more than anything that has actually happened.

That is not an exaggeration. The thing that happened, the arrangement that ended in February, was hard and it cost people and it was right, and he got through the whole of it functioning. He made lists. He handled the money. He was, by every account including his wife's, extraordinary.

It is August.

He has a diary with nothing in it past the fourteenth. He has a legal pad on the desk in the spare room that has said the same four words at the top since May. He opens it maybe twice a week, looks at it, and closes it.

He is fifty-two. He has been the man with the plan at every table he has sat at since he was in his twenties. Family holidays. His father's funeral. Two house moves and a business. If something needed a structure, Rob built the structure, and everybody let him, because he was good at it and because it is a relief to be around somebody like that.

Here is the day it caught.

His son, twenty-six, doing something practical about his own life, called and said, "Dad, can I run something past you?"

And Rob said, "Of course."

And they talked for forty minutes and it was good and Rob was useful, and at the end his son said, "Thanks. What about you? What's the plan?"

And Rob said, "Oh, you know. Working it out."

And then he sat in the spare room with the phone in his hand and a legal pad with four words on it and understood that he had just lied to his own son for the first time he could remember.

You know that. The thing you were always able to do is the thing you cannot do, and everybody still comes to you for it, and you are producing a version of it that is hollow and nobody has noticed yet.

The not knowing is in the verse

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

I am not going to give you a plan. That would be absurd and it would also be one more person handing you a structure to be responsible for. I am not going to tell you what is next, because I do not know, and I am not going to give you a verdict on what ended in February.

What I will do is read you one verse from the faith chapter and point at the clause everybody hurries past.

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.Hebrews 11:8

Not knowing whither he went.

Now that clause is doing something specific. It is not an apology. It is not a note about a weakness that had to be overcome. It sits inside the sentence that is praising him, as part of the description of the faith.

Read it again. By faith he went out, not knowing where. The not knowing is not the obstacle to the faith. It is the condition the faith operated in.

You are being described by that verse rather than excluded from it, and the not knowing is inside the commendation instead of beside it. Hebrews 11:8 puts the ignorance in the same clause as the obedience, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a spare room with a legal pad in it.

And notice what he did have. He was called. That is the only piece of information in the verse. Not a map, not a destination, not a plan. A call, and a man on a road.

You have never been required to hold the map in order to be moving correctly, and the only thing Abraham is credited with knowing is that he had been called. It is written that he obeyed and went out not knowing, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient sufficiency a present one.

Planning is a gift, not an identity

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

Rob's ability to build a structure is real and it is good and it has served his whole family for thirty years. I am not going to spiritualize it into an idol, which is the cheap move available here and which would be unfair to a man who has genuinely carried people.

You are not being told that your competence was a sin, and Scripture never once treats the ability to organize as a rival to God. Proverbs 21:5 commends the thoughts of the diligent, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a real gift from being reclassified as a fault.

But here is what has happened, and it is worth seeing plainly.

Somewhere in thirty years, a gift became a job description, and then the job description became an identity, and now a man who cannot produce a plan does not experience that as a temporary gap. He experiences it as being nobody.

And that is why the four words on the legal pad are terrifying out of all proportion to a piece of paper.

You have not stopped being what you are because a page is blank, and the whole of Hebrews 11 is a list of people identified by their walking rather than by their planning. Hebrews 11:8 credits a man for going out without one detail of a route, and the Holy Spirit is what puts a person's identity somewhere other than in their output.

And here is the smaller, sharper thing. You lied to your son. Not a large lie. Working it out. And that is not a moral crisis, but it is a signal, because a man who has told the truth to that boy for twenty-six years has just found the one subject he cannot.

You are permitted to say the true thing to your own son, and Scripture treats that as ordinary rather than as a collapse of authority. Galatians 6:2 has people bearing one another's burdens as normal practice, and the Holy Spirit is what makes another person knowing into a genuine lightening.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the months since February have gone somewhere heavier than blank, or if the spare room has become a place you dread, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your wife, your son, 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 what ended. That is me refusing to leave you in that room by yourself.