I Did The Work And I Am The One Ashamed

You did the work. It was good work. It was finished on time.

And somewhere in the last three weeks, the person who did not pay you has gone about their week perfectly comfortably, and you have been the one avoiding the subject.

You feel awkward bringing it up. You feel like you are the one being difficult. If you saw them in the street you would be the one who felt strange about it.

I want to point at that, because it is the most upside down thing in this whole situation and nobody ever says it out loud.

You have picked up something that was never yours, and a man waiting to be paid has never once been the one with anything to be ashamed of.

Let me put the two positions side by side, plainly.

One man has done what he agreed to do, completely, and is waiting.

The other man has not done what he agreed to do, and knows it, and has said nothing.

Now: which one should feel odd about running into the other in a shop.

Every instinct in you says it is the first one. That is what I want to take apart.

Let none that wait on thee be ashamed

There is a line in Psalm 25 where David asks for something specific about shame, and who it lands on.

Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed: let them be ashamed which transgress without cause. (Psalm 25:3, King James Version)

Let none that wait on thee be ashamed.

The word wait there covers exactly your position. A man who has done his part and is now in the position of waiting on somebody else.

You are named in a verse that asks for the shame to be taken off the one who is waiting, and the man doing the waiting has never once been the man that verse puts it on. Psalm 25:3 says let none that wait on thee be ashamed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the asking that way round.

And the second half makes the sorting explicit. Let them be ashamed which transgress without cause.

The psalm does not abolish shame. It relocates it. It asks that it sit where it belongs rather than where it has drifted.

You have a verse that moves a weight off one man and onto the situation it actually came from, and misplaced shame has never once stayed where it landed in that psalm. The Holy Spirit is the one who does that sorting, and it is written in Psalm 25:3 as two clauses that go in opposite directions.

Why it landed on you

Now let me say why it happened, because it is not weakness and it happens to the most decent men in any trade.

Asking for money feels like asking for a favor. It is not, but it feels like it, because the shape of the sentence is the shape of a request.

And a man who has spent his life not asking anybody for anything has a whole system in him for how that feels, and the system does not know the difference between asking for a favor and asking for wages.

You are running a reflex built for favors on a sentence that is not a favor, and asking to be paid has never once been the same act as asking for something. The written word puts the waiting man and the transgressing man on different sides of the shame, and the Spirit of God is the one who sorts a reflex from a fact.

And there is a second reason, and it is about who is comfortable.

The other man is not thinking about it. Not because he is heartless. Because unpaid things go to the bottom of a pile, and a thing at the bottom of a pile is not being thought about by anybody except the person waiting on it.

So the whole weight of the situation is being carried by one of the two people involved, and it is the one who did the work.

You are carrying the entire thing on your own, and an unpaid job has never once weighed the same on both ends of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who evens that out by getting a sentence sent, and Psalm 25:3 asks plainly for the weight to move off the one who waits.

One plain sentence, today

So the assignment, and it is one line, and the wording of it is the whole thing.

Send the message asking for it, today, in one plain sentence.

The work, the date, the ask. One line, sent in daylight.

You are able to write one line and send it today, and a plain request for wages has never once been a favor asked. The Spirit of God is the one who is present while a man sends something he has been avoiding for three weeks, and the written word asks for the shame to come off the man who has been waiting.

And here is the wording rule, and it is the one that matters for you specifically.

Do not apologize anywhere in it. No sorry to chase. No I hate to ask. No line about how busy they must be.

Every one of those hands the shame back to yourself in writing, and it is not yours to hand anywhere.

You are able to send a sentence with no apology in it, and a man asking for what he earned has never once needed to say sorry first. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man a level sentence, and it is written in Psalm 25:3 that the asking is for the waiting man to be free of it.

And do it today, in the daylight, from the truck, before you have time to build it up again.