They Said I Was the Favorite for the Job

It is a small box. That is one of the things nobody warns you about. Twelve years and it goes in a box you could carry in one hand.

A mug. A photograph in a frame that has gone slightly foxed at the edges. Two books he never read. A little wooden thing his daughter made at school that has sat on that desk since she was seven and she is nineteen now.

Everybody has been kind. That is the other thing. There has not been a single moment of unkindness in the whole process, and somehow that has made it worse, because there is nobody to be angry with and the anger has had to go somewhere else.

Twelve weeks ago the man who interviewed him for the expanded role said, in that room, leaning back: "Honestly, you are exactly what this needs. You are the favorite for it and I do not mind saying so."

Twelve weeks.

And on the Sunday between the interview and the decision, somebody at the front prayed about favor, and used the word four times, and he had sat there and felt something rise in his chest that he would be embarrassed to describe now.

He puts the wooden thing in last so it does not get squashed.

He is not going to make a scene. He is going to shake hands with three people on the way out and say the right things and drive home and tell his wife, and she will be very good about it, and that will be its own particular kind of hard.

If you have ever had a word said over you and then watched the exact opposite arrive, you know that desk. And you know the sentence underneath: either that word was empty, or it was about somebody else, or there is something about me it could not get past.

The word was never a prediction

Let me stand by that desk and say the low thing, because you will not say it in this building and you may not say it in the car either.

It is not the job. You have lost things before. It is that a religious word and a corporate word landed on you in the same two weeks, from a platform and from an interview panel, and then the outcome came in and disproved one of them, and you cannot work out which one, and the safest conclusion your mind can reach is that both were about somebody else.

So let me be plain about what the word means, because it has been used loosely at you from two directions.

Blessed does not mean things go your way. It means God's favor is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. That is what it means in Scripture from one end to the other, and it is a statement about where He is looking rather than a forecast about what arrives.

Now here is the verse that people quote when they say favor, and I want you to look at the picture inside it, because almost nobody does.

For thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield.Psalm 5:12

Favor as a shield.

Think about what a shield is for. A shield is not a promise that nothing will be thrown. A shield is what you are given precisely because things are going to be thrown. If nothing were coming, you would not need one, and the psalm would have used a different picture entirely.

You are compassed about with favor in this exact week, and the picture Scripture chose for it assumes the incoming. Psalm 5:12 says as with a shield, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an image from an ancient battle line and makes it usable by a man carrying a box, so what you have is protection rather than immunity.

Compass is the word to sit with

There is one more word in that verse and it does more work than the shield does.

Compass. It means to surround, to go all the way round. Not to stand in front of. Not to shield the good side. The favor in that verse is not a plate held up between a man and one particular arrow. It is something he is inside.

So the question was never whether favor stopped the redundancy. The question is what a man is standing inside while it happens.

And that changes what you go looking for in the last twelve weeks. Not for the arrow that was blocked, because you can never see those and it is a waste of an evening. For what has been true all the way round.

Your wife did not turn away from this, and there are marriages where twelve weeks like these do exactly that. Your daughter rang you on the Tuesday for no reason at all. The man who told you had to do it in person and did, and it cost him, and that is not nothing. You have slept, most nights. You have not been on your own in it.

You have been surrounded rather than defended at one point, and surrounded is what the psalm actually promised. Psalm 5:12 uses the word compass, which is all the way round rather than in front of, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as being with a person always rather than arriving for the crisis.

And notice who it says God blesses in that verse: the righteous. Not the successful. Not the ones who got the role. In Scripture the righteous means those who are in right standing with Him, and in the New Testament that standing is given rather than earned, which means the qualification in that verse is one thing you did not lose in a meeting.

You are righteous by a standing that was given to you and no restructure can review it. The written word puts the blessing on the righteous rather than on the appointed, and it is His Spirit who bears witness with your spirit about your standing, which is a witness no company holds a copy of.

The two things I will not say

Now, plainly, the two things I am not going to do, because you have had twelve weeks of people being confident at you and you have got very good at hearing it coming.

I am not going to tell you something better is on its way. I do not know that. Nobody in that building knows it and nobody at your church knows it, and a man carrying a box does not need a forecast dressed up as a word.

And I am not going to tell you this happened for a reason, or that the door closed so another could open, or that God took the role away because He had something else. That is the comfortable ditch. It makes God the author of your Friday and it makes your daughter's wooden thing part of a lesson plan. Companies restructure. That is what happened.

Both halves. This week is not the withdrawal of His favor and it is not His favor arriving in an unexpected shape.

You are inside His favor and you are carrying a box, and neither of those cancels the other. Scripture puts the blessing and the shield in one verse precisely because the incoming was assumed, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold two true things when he would much rather have one simple story.