Ideas come to me thick and fast. Often I am well down the road with one before I have asked whether it should exist. I like to think they start with God. A couple probably do.
At Risdon, in the early years, I was always looking for a way in — something that would connect the church to the street outside it. A hook, if I am honest about how I thought of it then, and then a slow reeling in.
The one I liked best was a driving academy.
The need was not invented. There were young people in that community whose families had no car, whose parents had never driven, and who were poor by any measure anyone cares to use. Without a licence they could not get to work, and without work there was not much else. I had already started teaching two of them — grandchildren of people in the congregation — in the church car, and that is where the idea came from.
Then the Tasmanian Government advertised grants for community organisations to buy vehicles for community benefit. It read as though it had been written for me. I did the research, wrote the application, and sent it in.
It was knocked back.
I was disappointed. It seemed to me that God had missed an opportunity that was too good to miss.
I did not drop it. A man in the church named Leon and I signed up as volunteers with a community driving academy that already existed and already had cars. Leon had three fingers on his right hand; he had lost the other two at work.
It worked. Not the way I had drawn it up, but young people in that community were learning to drive. What I had wanted to build already existed. I had only wanted to own it.
Then in 2014 Leon had an accident. A young girl was at the wheel; they were out on a lesson. Nobody was hurt except Leon's pride. The organisation worked through it afterwards — the repairs, the insurer, the forms, the months of it — and none of it came near us.
The idea was God's. The outworking I had drawn up myself.
In my Bible, Psalm 74 has a heading over it: Arise, O God, Defend Your Cause.
Whoever wrote it had watched men come into the sanctuary with axes. They hacked at the carved panelling like woodcutters working a thicket, they set the place alight, they brought it down to the ground. And then the question the psalm keeps coming back to. How long. How long is the enemy to scoff. Why do you hold back your hand.
Somewhere in the middle of it there is a line I read straight past.
We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long.
I took it as more of the same — another way of saying it is dark and God is quiet — and I moved on.
The psalm has already told me what a sign looks like. Back with the men and the axes: they set up their own signs for signs. Standards, emblems, whatever it was they carried, planted in the room where God's name lived.
It is the same word both times. Their signs are up. Ours are not seen.
Most English Bibles render the first one "emblems" or "standards", which is fair, and which means an ordinary reader cannot hear the two lines answering one another. I could not. The complaint is not only that the building is gone. It is that someone else's marks are standing where ours used to be.
With the grant, I found out. It took two years, but the reason arrived. I was allowed to see why the door I wanted open had been shut, and I have liked having the answer.
Psalm 74 was written by a man who does not find out. Nothing turns up two years later to explain the fire. He has lost the building, lost the prophet, and lost even the ability to tell how long the losing is going to go on, and the psalm finishes with him still not knowing.
I am not sure I would have kept praying.
He keeps praying. And when he does, he has nothing in front of him to argue from. So he goes back a long way instead. You bought this people. You split the sea. The day is yours and so is the night.
Arise, O God, defend your cause.
Not our cause. Yours.
I was overseas when Leon rang to tell me about the accident. It is a long way home, and I had plenty of hours to talk to God about it. By the time I landed the disappointment had gone. Those young people had never been my project. They were God's concern before they were mine.
A companion article, Telling It Wrong, follows the word "cause" through 1 Samuel 17 and Psalm 74 — and finds it in neither. An earlier reflection, Is There Not a Cause, took the same question to Psalm 45.