A Man Can Manage A Thing A Long Time

He has managed it for eleven years and he is extremely good at it.

That is the part nobody would guess. There is no crisis here. There has never been a crisis, and that is precisely the achievement, because a crisis would have got it out into the open a decade ago.

Instead there is a system.

There are three subjects he steers away from, and he does it so smoothly that nobody has ever noticed it happening, including his wife. There are two people he does not spend time alone with. There is a set of accounts he keeps himself, not dishonestly, just himself. There is a particular half hour on a Thursday that is his and that nobody asks about.

None of that is dramatic. Taken one at a time, every single item on that list is reasonable.

Taken together it is a second job, and he has been working it for eleven years alongside the first one, and it is the reason he is tired in a way that a holiday does not touch.

He is not being eaten alive. He would want me to say that. He sleeps, mostly. He is not in torment and he is not on the edge of anything.

He is simply spending a great deal of a life on maintenance.

So let me ask you, out here at a gate.

How much of your week goes on keeping it managed?

The proverb does not call it wickedness

There is a line in Proverbs that I have found more useful than almost anything else on this subject, and the reason is what it does not say.

It sets two ways of living side by side, the way that book always does, and it names the outcome of each.

Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.Proverbs 28:13

Read the word it uses about concealing. It says does not prosper.

Not wicked. Not damned. Unprosperous, which in that book is a word about how a life actually runs: whether it grows, whether it has slack in it, whether the thing you put in comes back.

Proverbs 28 measures concealing by the shape of a life rather than by the size of a crime, and the Spirit who gave that book its plain practical wisdom was naming a cost rather than a verdict, so the tiredness you cannot explain has been the proverb describing you accurately for eleven years.

And then the other half, and notice the two verbs.

Confesses and renounces. Says it, and turns from it. The saying is listed first and it is listed separately, which means it is not merely a report on a change that has already happened somewhere inside.

Now, let me be careful, in the way we are careful here.

I am not telling you who to say it to. Nothing in this article requires a particular person, a particular place, or any arrangement anybody has ever argued over, and I would not send a man somewhere I do not know the shape of.

What I am telling you is what eleven years of maintenance actually is.

Proverbs 28 puts finding mercy on the far side of saying it out loud, and the Spirit has never once treated competent management as the same thing as being free, which means you have been paying a wage for a decade that nobody was ever charging you.