He Rounds The Number Down Now

They were sat on a felled log with the flask going round and one of the younger men asked him straight out.

He said, how long has it been now.

He asked it kindly. There was nothing in it. He is a good lad and he was asking because he wanted to know.

And this man heard his own mouth say, oh, about six or seven years.

It is eleven. It has been eleven since the March, and he could give you the week.

He did not decide to do that. It came out of him already trimmed, the way a thing comes out when it has been done enough times that the hand knows the shape without being told.

Here is the reason, and he has thought about it a great deal, out here, on his own, in the truck.

Eleven sounds like an accusation.

Six or seven sounds like a long wait. Eleven sounds like an argument. It sounds, when it comes out of a man's mouth on a log in front of somebody younger who is still finding his way, like a case being made about God, and he will not have that said in his voice.

So he takes four years off it. Every time.

He is not ashamed of the eleven. He wants that to be clear. He is not embarrassed and he is not hiding anything for his own sake. He would carry twice as long as that without complaining.

He simply worked out somewhere along the way that the true number, said out loud, does damage to somebody's picture of God, and he decided to absorb the difference himself, and he has been absorbing it for about four years now.

Nobody has ever known. Not his wife, not the man he has worked beside for nineteen years.

If you have been shaving years off it to protect somebody, come and sit down on the log. There is still tea in that flask and nobody is asking you anything.

A man who kept the whole account

There is a book in the Bible that is nothing but a man refusing to shorten his own account of what happened.

My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.Lamentations 3:20

Them. The whole list. Everything that came, kept in remembrance, not one item rounded off.

That is a man sitting with the full weight of it and saying so, in writing, in a book that got kept and read aloud in public for the next twenty five centuries.

And here is the thing worth noticing. The famous lines, the ones about mercies being new every morning, come two verses later. They do not come instead of this verse. They come after it, on the far side of a man who would not trim his own arithmetic.

You are keeping the kind of account Scripture keeps, and the whole number has never been a charge against anybody. Lamentations 3:20 has a man holding the full weight in remembrance and refusing to shorten it, and the Holy Spirit kept his complete account in the book rather than an edited one, which means the eleven is inside Scripture's own way of speaking and it is not a thing to be managed down.

God has never once needed protecting from your arithmetic

Now the reason you do it, because it is a good reason and it is wrong, and it is going to take a minute to separate those.

You have been protecting Him. That is what the four years is. You worked out that the true number might land badly on a younger man and cost him something, and you decided to carry the difference yourself rather than let that happen. There is nothing small about that. But look at what it assumes. It assumes He cannot survive being told the truth about how long.

You are speaking to a God who wrote the long numbers into His own book on purpose. Psalm 13:1 has a man asking how long four times in two verses, and Habakkuk opens a whole prophecy with the same question, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept every one of those askings in the record rather than tidying them out, which means the true count coming out of your mouth is not new information and it has never once damaged His reputation.

He put the long waits in the book Himself. Twenty five years for Abraham. Thirteen for Joseph in a country he did not choose. Nobody rounded those down either.

Nobody here is going to hurry you

Let us be plain about what will not be asked out here, because the bracing for it starts on the first line.

Nobody is going to tell you to hope harder. Nobody is going to explain what the eleven years is for, and nobody is going to reach past the first half of the proverb to hand you the second half before the first half has been allowed to sit on this log for a while.

You are not being charged with anything, and the sickness in your chest has never once been read as unbelief. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick and then stops, with no advice and no correction fastened to that clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in exactly that order, which means eleven years producing what you carry is precisely what the word says happens to a person.