I Have Counted It Four Times

You have counted it four times.

Not because you forgot the number. You know the number. You have counted it four times because there is a part of a person that believes if you go through it once more, slowly, something you missed the first three times will show up in the column.

It never does. It comes out the same, and you sit back, and you feel worse than before you started, and about forty minutes have gone.

I want to say something about that before anything else, because I think you have been calling it responsibility.

Counting is not doing. It feels like doing. It has all the shape of doing: there is a pen, there is a surface, there is concentration and there is effort, and at the end of it you are tired in the way that work makes you tired. But the number has not moved and the week has not moved and nothing in your actual situation is different than it was when you sat down.

You have something in your house, and four recounts have never once been the same thing as one honest look.

And I am not going to tell you the money is coming. I do not know that and nobody who writes for a living knows that about your month, and if somebody has told you otherwise they were selling something.

What I am going to do is put a question in front of you that is older than both of us, and it is not the question you have been asking.

You have been asking how much is missing. The question I want to hand you asks what is here.

What hast thou in the house

There is a woman in 2 Kings who is in worse trouble than you, and I say that plainly rather than as a comfort.

Her husband is dead. She is in debt. And the creditor is coming to take her two sons into service, which was legal and normal and completely ruinous, and she goes to Elisha because there is nowhere else to go.

And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for thee? tell me, what hast thou in the house? And she said, Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil. (2 Kings 4:2, King James Version)

Read what she says again, because this is the whole thing. Not any thing in the house. Save a pot of oil.

She gives him both answers in one breath. First the answer she believes, which is nothing. Then, tacked on the end, almost as an apology, the thing that is actually there.

You are a person who has already said nothing out loud while holding something, and a word tacked on at the end has never once been a small thing because it came last. It is written in 2 Kings 4:2, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my saying so who gets a person to finish the sentence they were going to leave at nothing.

Notice also that the prophet does not argue with her about the nothing.

He does not say come now, you must have something. He asks a question, and he asks it about her house rather than about the sky, and the question is so ordinary that it gets an honest answer out of a woman who was braced for a sermon.

You have not been asked to produce something out of nowhere. You have been asked what is in the house. The Holy Spirit is the one who narrows a question down to something a person can actually answer, and the written word puts that question in a prophet's mouth before anything else happens.

The fifth count will say the same thing

Let me be concrete about the arithmetic, because I do not think this is irrational. I think it is a reasonable thing carried past the point where it stayed reasonable.

The first count was necessary. You needed to know.

The second count was checking, which is fair enough.

The third and fourth counts were something else, and I think you know what. They were a way of being with the problem without being in front of it. Because while you are counting, you are not yet at the part where you have to do something, and the part where you have to do something is the part that frightens you.

You are not avoiding this and you are not in denial. You are a man standing at the edge of a cold lake, counting. Scripture has a widow answer nothing first and oil second, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not shame a person for the pause before the honest answer.

So here is what I would like to happen instead of a fifth count.

One sheet. Not the one with the numbers on it. A different one, so that the two are not looking at each other.

And on it, one line: something you could do this week that a person would pay you to do.

Not a plan. Not a list of twenty. One line.

You are able to write one line, and a single honest sentence on a page has never once been too small a start for a man in a hard month. The Spirit of God is the one who works with small beginnings, and 2 Kings 4:2 begins with one pot that the woman herself had discounted.

And I will tell you what I expect to happen when you go to write it, because it happened to me and it happens to nearly everybody.

You will think of something and immediately think: that does not count.

That thought is the pot of oil. Write it down anyway.

You have already thought of it, and a thing you were about to cross out has never once been disqualified for being obvious to the person holding it. 2 Kings 4:2 lets the oil arrive in the sentence as an afterthought, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from deleting their own answer before anybody has heard it.

Nothing wrong with your hands

I want to say one more thing about the shape of this, and then we will get to what you do today.

The reason the counting has such a hold is that it keeps the problem inside your head, which is where your competence lives. Thinking is a strength here. Most men who count four times have that strength.

The moment you write a line about work, the problem moves out of your head and into a place where another person has to be involved, and that is a different kind of exposure altogether.

You are moving something from a place where you are safe into a place where you can actually be helped, and stepping out of your own head has never once been a demotion. The written word sends a woman to her neighbors for vessels in the very next verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a private problem into the room where other people are.

And before we go further, one plain sentence that belongs here and not at the end.

If the counting has got to the point where you are awake at three in the morning with it, and it has started to include thoughts about whether the people in your house would be better off without you, that is not a money problem any more and it is not something to solve on your own at a kitchen table. Call or text 988, the crisis line, tonight, and tell one person who knows you. A doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust. That is not weakness and it is not off the subject: it is the first honest thing in the house.

You are allowed to need somebody qualified, and asking for help with the weight has never once been a failure of nerve. 2 Kings 4:2 has a woman going straight to the one person who could do anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a helper in reach of a person who has stopped being able to carry it.