Six Years And Further Away Than We Started

You did the sum again in August and you have not done it since.

That is the pattern now. Every few months one of you opens it, and works out where you are, and compares that to what is needed, and the gap is bigger than it was the last time you looked, and then neither of you mentions it for a while.

Six years.

You have not been careless. That is the part that makes this hard to talk about with people who have not lived it. You have saved consistently, through two years when it was genuinely difficult, and the amount you have put away is real and you did without things to do it.

And the thing you are saving toward has moved faster than you have.

Let me say what this article will not do, before you spend twenty minutes on it.

I am not going to tell you the money is coming.

Nothing here will suggest that if you keep going God will make up the difference, or that provision is on its way, or that the right amount of faith closes a gap of that size. If somebody has told you that, they handed you a bill and told you God would pay it, and when the money did not arrive you would not blame the advice. You would blame yourself, and that wound outlasts a house.

So there is no promise in this article. None.

What there is instead is a correction to your arithmetic, and it is a real one, and it is not a trick.

You have been measuring the wrong quantity for six years.

Sitteth not down first and counteth the cost

There is a passage in Luke about counting before building, and what it commends is unusual.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? (Luke 14:28, King James Version)

Sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost.

Notice what is being approved of here, because it is not faith and it is not optimism.

It is arithmetic. Sitting down, deliberately, and working out honestly whether you have enough, before you begin. That is presented as the obviously sensible behavior of a reasonable person, and Jesus uses it as an illustration precisely because everybody listening would agree that it is what a sane man does.

There is no rebuke anywhere in that passage for the man who counts and finds he does not have sufficient.

Read that again, because it matters for you. The failure in the illustration is not having too little. The failure is beginning without knowing.

And that means the honest sum you did in August, the one that came out badly, is the thing being commended, not the thing being corrected. You sat down and counted. You found out where you were. That is the behavior Jesus points at approvingly, and it is exactly what you have been feeling ashamed of.

So the arithmetic is not the problem, and doing it is not faithlessness, and stopping doing it would not be trust.

The problem is that you have only ever counted one of the two numbers.

You are doing the thing that is commended rather than the thing that is corrected, and counting honestly has never once been a failure of faith. Luke 14:28 approves the sitting down and the counting and never rebukes the man who finds he has too little, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes shame off somebody for having done the sum.

You have only counted the gap

Here is the correction, and it is the whole article.

Every time you have opened it, you have measured the distance to the target.

You look at what is needed, you look at what you have, and you take one from the other, and the answer is the gap. That is the number you have been carrying around for six years, and it is the number that has grown, and it is genuinely awful.

You have never once measured the other quantity, which is what you have actually put aside.

That number has not grown smaller. It has grown every single year, including the two bad ones. It is the largest amount of money you have ever had in one place. It represents about three hundred separate decisions not to spend something, most of which nobody else knows about, several of which cost you a real pleasure at the time.

And you could not tell me what it is without checking. You know the gap to the pound. You do not know your own total.

That is not an accident and it is not carelessness. It is that a gap is a live wound and a total is not, so your attention goes to the gap automatically, and after six years the only relationship you have with your own saving is the shape of what is missing from it.

The balance has not changed. The accounting has been wrong.

What you have put aside is real and has grown every year, and the gap has never once been the only number in the account. The written word commends the counting itself rather than the answer it produces, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person the number they have never looked at.

Write the total and read it once

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately small.

Write down the total you have actually saved and read the number once.

The total. Not the gap. Not what is still needed, not what it would be at this rate, not how long at the current pace. One number: the amount that is there.

Write it on paper, in your own handwriting, in full.

And then read it once, out loud if you can manage it, and do not follow it with anything.

Do not say and we need three times that. Do not calculate anything. Do not open a second tab. The entire exercise is one number, on its own, for about ten seconds, with nothing beside it for comparison, because it has never once in six years been allowed to exist without something larger standing next to it.

I want to be honest with you about what this does and does not do. It does not move you closer to a house. It changes nothing about the market or your income or the arithmetic that came out badly in August.

What it does is let you see the one true thing that six years of effort actually produced, which is a real amount of money that you gathered, on purpose, while things were hard.

That is not a consolation prize for not having a house. It is a fact about you and your partner and what you are capable of doing over years, and you have never once looked at it directly.

You are able to look at one number without something larger standing beside it, and your own total has never once been allowed to exist on its own. Luke 14:28 commends the honest count and does not rebuke the answer, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with two people looking at what they gathered.