I laid bricks for two years and I was good at it. I liked the evidence of it — a wall where there had been no wall.
The sense that I was meant to do something else did not arrive as a voice. It arrived as a question that would not leave, and I was very skilled at not answering it.
I counted the cost carefully and honestly, and the maths said no. A wife, a child, a rent. The maths was not wrong.
What changed was a night in October when I realised I had been treating the question as a proposal I could negotiate, when it was an invitation I could only accept or decline.
So I said it out loud in the kitchen, at a volume my wife could hear, so that I could not quietly take it back in the morning. Here I am. Send me.
We moved. The first eighteen months were harder than I have ever told anyone. And I would say yes again, in the kitchen, at the same volume.
If you are waiting to understand before you obey, I understand the instinct. But I have never once understood first.
