Passed Over Again on Friday

They told her in the corridor.

Not in a room. In the corridor by the printers, on a Friday at ten past four, because he was on his way somewhere and he had seen her and he clearly decided that telling her now was kinder than letting her have the weekend wondering, and he may even have been right about that.

"Just so you hear it from me. It has gone to Danielle. Really strong field. You interviewed brilliantly."

And he did the thing with his hand, half a pat, not quite landing.

She trained Danielle. Two years ago. Sat with her for three weeks and showed her the whole system, including the parts that are not written down anywhere and only exist in the heads of about four people, of whom she is one.

Third time.

That is what is actually in her chest as she goes back to her desk and puts her screen to sleep and gets her coat. Not the job. The third time. Six years she has been saying a particular thing over her working life, that God has favor for her here, that there is a purpose in her being in this building, and she has said it in faith and she has meant it and she has told other people to say it too.

Three times the door has been opened for somebody else while she held it.

If you have ever been told something in a corridor at ten past four on a Friday, you know that walk back to the desk. And you know the sentence underneath, which arrives about halfway home: I have been saying a thing over my life for six years and the evidence is now three to nothing, and at some point saying it again stops being faith and starts being something I do not have a word for.

What the word means, plainly, before the third time

Let me say the low thing first because you will not say it out loud until Sunday and by then you will have made it sound better.

It is not the post. You have wanted things before and not got them. It is that you have been declaring something over your working life for six years and it now looks, on any honest reading, to have been disproved three times by the same building. And when a word you have spoken in faith gets contradicted repeatedly, you do not usually conclude that the word was wrong. You conclude something about your own standing with God, quietly, on the way home.

So let me put the word straight before we go any further.

Blessed does not mean things go your way. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a statement about where God is looking, not about what arrives, and there is no verse anywhere that turns it into a hiring decision.

Now, here is a sentence from a sermon Stephen preached about a man everybody thinks of as the great example of favor, and I want you to notice how much of his life it covers in one clause.

And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him, and delivered him out of all his afflictions, and gave him favour and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh.Acts 7:9-10

God was with him. And then, in the same breath, the afflictions, plural, and the deliverance out of all of them, which means all of them happened.

Stephen is compressing about thirteen years into one sentence there, and in those thirteen years Joseph is sold, enslaved, lied about, imprisoned, and then forgotten by a man who promised to speak for him. The favor is in the sentence the entire time. It is not something that arrives at the end and gets applied retrospectively.

You have God with you in the corridor and He was with you the first two times as well, and the word never once required a different outcome to be true. Acts 7 puts God was with him in the same sentence as the afflictions rather than after them, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a compressed thirteen years and lays it beside a woman's six.

Forgotten for two full years

Now I want to stay on the part of that story nobody preaches, because it is the part that fits a corridor by the printers.

Joseph interprets a dream for a man who is about to be restored, and he asks him one thing: remember me. Mention me. And the man is restored, and Genesis says: yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him.

Then the very next words are: and it came to pass at the end of two full years.

Two full years. Somebody was in the room, somebody could have said his name, and did not, for two years. That is not a lesson about patience. That is a man being overlooked by somebody who owed him, at length, while the favor of God was on him.

You have been overlooked by people who were in the room, and that has happened before to somebody God was demonstrably with. Genesis 40:23 records the forgetting bluntly and the written word does not tidy it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to keep a person steady inside a two year silence rather than only after it.

And I am not going to do the thing that gets done with this story, which is to say that it was all setting up the palace, so your third time is setting something up too. I do not know that. Nobody does. Joseph got a palace; Jeremiah got a cistern and then a foreign country and no vindication in his lifetime, and the same God was with both of them.

What Stephen says is not "and it all worked out". What Stephen says is "God was with him". That is the claim, and it is the only one I am making.

You have been accompanied through three of these, and accompanied is what was actually promised. Scripture states God's presence with Joseph before it states any outcome at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who is that presence now, in a corridor, in a car, on a Friday.

About saying it again

Now the real question, which is not about Danielle. It is whether you can say the thing again on Sunday without lying.

Here is what I would change, and it is one word.

You have been saying: God has favor for me here, meaning in this building, meaning it will show up as a post. That is not a wicked thing to have said and half of it is straight out of Scripture. But you have attached the word to an outcome, and the outcome is not what the word was ever about, and that is why three refusals feel like a theological problem instead of a bad run.

Say instead: God's favor is on me here. Present tense, and about you rather than about the building's decisions.

Because that one is not waiting on anybody's shortlist and it cannot be disproved by a fourth Friday.

You are favored in that building today, and the building was never able to confirm or deny it. The written word puts the favor on the person rather than in the circumstances, and it is His Spirit who bears witness with your spirit, which is a witness that does not sit on any panel.

And you are allowed to be angry, and to look elsewhere, and to want to leave. None of those is a failure of faith. A woman who has trained the person who got the job three times is entitled to update her expectations about a building. That is not doubt, it is information.