By The Time I Have Checked, It Is Thursday

She is careful and she has never once been sorry about it.

She was raised by people who had watched enthusiasm do damage in a small place, and she absorbed the lesson the way children absorb things, which is completely and without argument. You do not say a thing about God until you have checked it. You do not act on a feeling. You sit with it.

And she has. For about forty years.

The process is not lazy. That needs saying, because from outside it can look like a woman who never does anything, and that is not what is happening in her at all.

When something arrives, she gives it time, which is right. She asks whether it is her own idea dressed up, which is a good question. She checks it against Scripture, which is what she was taught and is not wrong. She thinks about whether it would embarrass anybody. She thinks about whether she would still want to do it if nobody knew. She waits to see whether it is still there in the morning.

And every single one of those is defensible, and she could give you the reason for it, and the reasons are good.

But on Sunday, standing at the sink, she did some arithmetic she had never done before.

The thing about her neighbor arrived on Saturday. She had begun to be satisfied about it by Wednesday. And on Thursday she had gone round and the woman had said, kindly, that she was just on her way out.

And she stood at the sink and thought: how many times has it been Thursday?

And she could not answer, because she has never once counted, because she has been so busy being careful that she has never noticed that carefulness has a clock in it.

And that is you at your own sink, or you would not have read this far.

The verse describes a voice that arrives while you are walking

Let me give you the sentence, and then let me show you what shape of thing it describes.

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, "This is the way, walk in it," when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.Isaiah 30:21

Look at the setting. Somebody is walking. They are at a turn. The word comes from behind them, which means it arrives while they are already in motion, and what it says is short.

This is the way. Walk in it.

There is no interval built into that picture. There is not a version of that sentence which allows for four days of examination, because by Thursday the person has already turned right or left and the moment the word was addressed to has gone.

You are being spoken to in motion, and the sort of word Scripture describes is short and arrives at a turn. It is written that your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, this is the way, walk in it (Isaiah 30:21). The Holy Spirit gives the kind of direction a person can act on before they have finished analyzing it.

Now I want to be very careful here, because I am not about to tell you to stop testing things and you would be right to stop reading if I did.

Keep the process. All of it. And put it where the risk is.

Here is the distinction nobody gave you, and it is the whole message.

Your process is designed for a claim. It is built for the moment somebody is going to say God has told me about a person's life, and it is exactly right for that, and the people who raised you were right to build it, and the world would be better if more people had one.

The thing about your neighbor was not a claim. It was: go round.

There is no version of going round on a Saturday which requires four days of verification, because the worst possible outcome of being wrong is that a woman has an unexpected visitor and makes a cup of tea.

You are able to act on a small kind thing without testing it, because the cost of being wrong is nothing at all. It is written that we are to encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thessalonians 5:11), and there is no clause in it requiring certification first. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to lower your standards, He is asking you to notice that this one has no risk in it.

And one more thing, because I think it is underneath the arithmetic.

You are not going to do harm by going round on a Saturday, and forty years of carefulness has not been wasted. It is written that we are to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and holding fast is a thing you have done faithfully. The Holy Spirit is not correcting your instinct, He is asking for the difference between a claim and a kindness.