I Can See It Coming

You can see it from here.

Not this week. This week is fine, or near enough. It is the one after the one after, and you can see the shape of it already, because you know what comes out and you know what is coming in and the two of them do not meet.

And here is what has been happening to those twenty one days in between.

You have been spending them. Not the money. The days. You are already inside that Friday three weeks out, most of the time, in the back of your mind while you drive and while you eat and while your son tells you about something at school.

So the shortfall has not arrived yet and it has already taken three weeks off you.

You are not cursed with foresight, and seeing it coming has never once been the same thing as bringing it on.

And I am not going to tell you that the Friday will be fine. I do not know that, and a man who has done this arithmetic already knows when he is being handled.

What I want to do is give you back some of the twenty one days, because they are real days with real hours in them, and at the moment they are being used as a waiting room.

The prudent man foreseeth the evil

There is a proverb that describes exactly this, and it does not call it anxiety.

A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished. (Proverbs 22:3, King James Version)

A prudent man foreseeth.

That is the same act you performed at the kitchen table with a calendar. You looked forward, you saw a thing coming, and you understood what it would mean. Scripture has a name for that and the name is prudence.

You are doing the thing a proverb calls wise rather than the thing it calls foolish, and seeing a hard week in advance has never once been a failure of trust. Proverbs 22:3 calls that man prudent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the word prudent there instead of the word fearful.

But look at the second verb, because it is the one you have skipped.

Foreseeth, and hideth himself. Two actions. He sees it, and then he does something.

The proverb never once suggests that seeing it is the whole job. The man who is praised in that verse moves after he looks, and the moving is what separates him from the man who walks into it.

You have completed the first half of a two part instruction, and stopping at the seeing has never once been what that verse called prudent. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from looking to doing, and it is written in Proverbs 22:3 with both verbs in the same line.

Dread is not preparation

Let me say the thing I most want you to hear, because I think it has been disguised as responsibility.

Dread feels like preparation. It has the same texture. The problem gets thought about constantly, with real seriousness, and at the end of a day of it a man is worn out in the way that work wears a man out.

But nothing was prepared. The Friday is exactly where it was. The only thing that changed is that a Tuesday got used up.

You are tired from something that has not protected anybody, and three weeks of dread have never once moved a single figure in either direction. The written word pairs the seeing with an act, and the Spirit of God is the one who will not leave a man sitting in the looking.

And here is the specific cost in your house, and you already know it, which is why this part is uncomfortable.

Your children can tell. Not the details. The weather. They know when Dad is somewhere else, and they have been living with a man who is three weeks into the future for most of the evening, most nights.

You have a week in front of you that your family is actually living in, and being present tonight has never once been a smaller thing than solving it. The Spirit of God is the one who brings a man back into the room he is standing in, and Proverbs 22:3 puts the action in the present rather than in the week it is aimed at.

Twenty one days is not nothing

So let us do something with the days rather than about the Friday.

Twenty one days is three weeks of evenings. It is three Saturdays. It is a long time, and it is long enough for something to actually start, which is a different claim from saying it is long enough for something to finish.

I am not telling you the gap gets closed in it. I am telling you the days are real and they are currently unspent.

You have twenty one days in your hands and not one of them has been used yet, and a stretch of ordinary evenings has never once been too small a thing to start in. The Holy Spirit is the one who redeems time a man had written off, and the written word puts a man's action right after his foresight without a gap between them.

One line. That is where it starts, and I will not dress it up.

One thing you could do this week that somebody would pay for. Not a plan for the three weeks. One thing, this week, from the skills already in your hands and from the people already in your phone.

And plainly, because on this site it goes where it belongs. If the Friday you can see has begun to look like more than a hard month, if you have found yourself thinking that your wife and your children would be better off with somebody else in the house, that thought is a liar and it is not a thing to carry alone into a third week. Call or text 988, the crisis line, today, and say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust.

You are allowed to hand the weight to somebody qualified, and asking for that has never once made a man less of a father. The Spirit of God is the one who puts a real helper within reach, and it is written that the prudent man does something about what he sees rather than standing still under it.