For the life of me, I could not settle down and write the thing. It wasn't the client's fault--the client was quite delightful, in fact, an old-friend client for whom we've done a lot of work. The subject was interesting enough (sustainable development policy for the mining industry). I had enough materials, but wasn't swamped as I sometimes am, when the client hands me two or three thousand pages of "background" for a brief report. True, the format wasn't my usual style--speaking notes, not a proper report--but that called for an informal style that I'm good at and like doing. So why, why, WHY couldn't I write the danged thing?

I'm usually reasonably disciplined and thoroughly professional about my paid work: I sit down to the keyboard and dive into writing with very little hesitation. But this time, I couldn't get on the diving board. I couldn't even seem to get near the pool--and it was couldn't, not wouldn't. I spent Monday and Tuesday allowing myself to be sidetracked by good church and community-building things. Wednesday, I was still spinning my wheels. Got called in for another meeting on Thursday, this time (I gathered from talking with colleagues) with someone who "needed a chance to have his say." Ego, I thought. Waste of my time.

In fact, the meeting was crucial; without it, I would have been entirely on the wrong track. This particular expert steered me neatly in directions that felt intuitively right. At the same time, another aspect of my work life popped into place--the necessary resolution of a deep internal stress, like a fault line shuddering, snapping, and settling down in a new and less strained configuration. Those two things happened on Thursday--and on Friday it was as though someone had taken the blocks away from under my wheels. I wrote the equivalent of a ten-page term paper between 9:30 AM and 3 PM, with time off for lunch. (It helps to be a fast touch-typist.) Beat the deadline by one whole weekend.

It's funny. We look at someone (perhaps even ourselves) with puzzlement: it's clearly in her own best interests to change a particular sort of self-defeating behaviour: why on earth can't she simply DO it? We can think, without heat or judgment but in simple puzzlement, how can people sit in those pews week after week, hearing the Gospel proclaimed and taught, and still not get it? Why do people get so badly stuck?

Looking back at my apparently wasted week, I can see three things. First, doing anything before that Thursday meeting would have been a serious waste of time, and might very well have been disastrous to the project. There was absolutely no way I could have known that, though. If I was being held back for that reason, it had to have been God's foot on the brake because none other could have known how important that meeting was.

Second, I was sinking so much energy into that internal conflict that I had none left for work. And it was the resolution of the problem that released the energy I needed for a burst of writing.

And third, the time I'd spent on what seemed like unprofessional stuff--church/community building--was indeed necessary for the job. Paradoxically, doing these apparently unrelated things left me free to work at top speed on Friday. We never know what, in God's eyes, is relevant and deeply important, that seems trivial or silly to us.

There are things about my life that I know I need to change, and want very much to change, and will change in due course--but right now, I don't seem to be able to. If I can't change these things now, maybe there are reasons that won't become clear to me until later. Maybe instead of panicking and blaming myself, I should trust my soul and God to work it out together.

And also, maybe after this week, I'll be a little less quick to assume that people are just being lazy or unmotivated when they don't make the changes that (to me, at least) they should obviously be making--who seem to be stalled. Maybe I'll wonder just whose foot is on the brake.

Things come to pass in God's good time, with God's grace, when God knows the time is right. Our job sometimes is just to sit tight and hang in there, until whatever stars there are align.