I Have Never Said A Price In My Life

In forty years nobody ever asked you what it cost.

There was a rate. It was on a sheet somewhere, decided by somebody in an office you never went into, and it went up sometimes and you found out about it in a letter.

You did the work. Somebody else did the number. That was the arrangement and there was nothing wrong with it.

And now it has ended, one way or another, and a man has asked you what you want for a job, and you have discovered something surprising about yourself at your age.

You have never said a price out loud in your life. Not once. Not in forty years.

You are new at this and not bad at it, and a man who has never done a thing has never once been a man who cannot.

I want to name that plainly because I think you have been calling it something else.

You have probably been calling it being no good at the business side. Or being too soft. Or being from a generation that did not do this.

None of those are the diagnosis. The diagnosis is that this is the first time, and the first time at anything is clumsy, and a man of sixty is not used to being a beginner and finds it undignified.

Be strong and of a good courage

There is an instruction given to a man taking over a job that nobody had ever done except the man before him.

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. (Joshua 1:9, King James Version)

Be strong and of a good courage. Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.

Two different things there. Afraid is about what might happen. Dismayed is about how a man feels looking at himself in the middle of it.

You are addressed in a verse that names both the fear and the dismay, and a man discouraged by his own clumsiness has never once been outside what that sentence covers. Joshua 1:9 says be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put two separate words there instead of one.

And the reason given at the end is not about ability. For the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.

Not: because you are ready. Not: because you have done this before. Because of company, in whatever place a man ends up standing.

You have been given company rather than competence as the reason, and a man who has never done a thing has never once been sent out on the strength of his experience. The Holy Spirit is the one who goes whithersoever a man goes, and it is written in Joshua 1:9 as the ground of the whole instruction.

Forty years is not nothing here

Now let me say something that I think will surprise you, and it is about what you actually bring to this.

A price has never come out of that mouth. But forty years went into finding out what work is worth, because jobs went wrong in front of you, and the cost of somebody cheap doing it got watched at close range, and nobody has to tell you how long things take.

That is the hard part of pricing. The saying it out loud is the easy part, and it is the only part you have not done.

You have the difficult half already and are missing the simple half, and forty years of watching work has never once left a man ignorant about what work is worth. The written word sends a man into a new job on the ground of company, and the Spirit of God is the one who counts what a man is actually carrying.

And here is the thing about being a beginner at sixty, which is the part nobody says out loud.

It is humiliating in a way it is not at twenty. At twenty everybody is a beginner and nobody notices. At sixty a man expects himself to be past this, and the gap between expectation and reality is where the discouragement lives.

You are measuring a first attempt against forty years of competence, and a beginning has never once been a fair thing to compare against a lifetime of practice. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man from being dismayed at his own beginning, and Joshua 1:9 names the dismay specifically rather than only the fear.

Say it in the yard first

So the assignment, and for you the practice matters more than for most.

Say your price out loud to yourself three times, then say it to the next person who asks.

In the yard, in the truck, at the gate, somewhere nobody can hear. Three times, in your own voice, at the volume you would use with a man standing in front of you.

Because your mouth has genuinely never made this shape. It is not a confidence problem, it is a mechanical one, and mechanical problems are solved by repetition.

You are able to put a new sentence into an old mouth, and a man of sixty has never once been too late to say something for the first time. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a man talking to nobody at a gate, and the written word sends a man out on company rather than on practice.

And then say it to the next person who asks, and say it once, and let it stand there.

If it comes out badly, it comes out badly. That is a first attempt. There will be a second one this month and it will be better, and the only way to the second one is through the first.

You are able to do it badly the first time, and a clumsy beginning has never once been a report on what a man will be at it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody whithersoever he goes, and it is written in Joshua 1:9 that the courage was commanded before anything had been proved.