This is one of those ‘Sunday words’ that whispers in my ear and makes me scribble incoherent words, on the back of a receipt or something I can find in my bag, halfway through a song.

This thing about being ‘finished’. I feel like some of us feel like we’ve left our run too late, we’re too exhausted, we’re so far from ever getting there that we’re never going to make it.

It’s like time has left us behind and we in our heart it echoes loud, ‘I’m finished’ or maybe it utters some other iteration ‘I’m disqualified’, ‘I’ve been passed over’, ‘There is no room for someone like me.’

If only we’d committed to our passion earlier.

If only we’d been wiser.

If only we’d held on longer.

… and the future smears out like a smudge across a future with no guarantees. Our heart breaks a little. We sigh. This finished doesn’t feel like the finish of an athlete gasping across the line. It’s an empty, shallow finish. A finish without hope.

I look at myself and I think – I’m too old to make a run of a whole new thing and do it well. I think to myself how can you still be unsure about what direction to head in? There are women doing it better already and they’re 10 years younger. I look at myself and I think no matter how much I believe in equality, in validity, in the promotion of God – I’m playing a game on a field where there’s still some weary distance between a woman with a mouth full of words and the men all doing it.

Sometimes I cry for the lack of women (or men) Pauls for the women Timothys….

I look to the one who levelled the playing field. I hear – It’s finished and it’s not finished and it won’t be until I say it is.

Because it was finished on a hill named after a skull years ago. That finish did it all. That finish tore a heavy, heavy curtain that separated us from the Presence. That finish levelled the playing field forever. That finish said – it.is.done. No more doing to get you in, no more qualifying, no more games. You are in because the dividing line is forever erased. Every person on the wrong side of age, gender, race, intelligence, hierarchy, ability… suddenly found that the door that shut them out no longer existed.

and…. it isn’t finished.

There is the tension and the joy. Because Jesus finished it once, for all, and God promises that when he begins a good work in us he will be faithful to bring it to completion.

It isn’t finished until God is finished.

I’m not finished until God is finished writing the story.

I’ll know when He has finished the story because at that moment I will behold Him face to face. At that moment I will be completely transformed.

Until then….

I am not finished.

There is race in me still.

There is Hope for me still.

There is inheritance for me here.

I will see the goodness of God in the land of the living Psalm 27

Do you need to know once and for all that it is finished? Do you need to rest in that dear one? Do you need to hear the Hope that says – I’ve finished it for you?

or do you need a promise that it isn’t finished? You are not finished. There is more.

There is more for you.

There is more from you.