Cast Upon The Waters

She would like to know whether it helped. That is all. Not who, not how much, not by name.

Just whether.

And she has slowly come to understand that she is not going to know, because of the shape of what she does. Her work goes out and joins people's lives at a point she cannot observe, and none of them will ever have a reason to tell her anything, and even if one did it would be one out of thousands and would tell her almost nothing.

She used to be able to work without knowing. She is finding it harder.

That is the actual development and it worries her more than the not knowing does. Six years ago she could do the work and let it go. Now she gets to the end of a thing and there is a small stall, a moment of standing there wanting some kind of receipt, and the receipt does not come and never will.

She said to a friend that she has started needing to know before she can start the next one, and that she can feel this becoming a problem, and that she cannot see any way out of it because the information genuinely does not exist.

You may know that stall. The pause at the end of something, waiting for a confirmation that the shape of your work makes impossible, and a growing dependence on a thing that is never going to arrive.

Bread on water

Here is an old instruction, and the image in it is deliberately one you cannot follow.

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.Ecclesiastes 11:1

Bread on water is the most untrackable thing a person could do. You put it out and the current takes it and there is no version of that action where you get to watch where it goes.

And the writer is not warning against it. He is instructing it.

Read the next verses and it gets clearer: he goes on about not knowing which will prosper, this or that, and about a man who watches the wind too closely never sowing at all. The whole passage is about acting without confirmation, and it treats that as the normal condition of any useful life rather than as a problem to be solved.

You are doing the ordinary thing that useful work has always required, which is releasing it without watching where it lands. Ecclesiastes 11:1 instructs the untrackable act rather than warning against it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman work without a receipt she was never going to get.

Now let me name what has actually changed in six years, because you were right to be more worried about that than about the not knowing.

The not knowing did not increase. Your need for information did. And need grows in exactly this way: something that was fine becomes uncomfortable, then becomes a condition, and then becomes the thing you are waiting for before you can begin.

That is not a character flaw. It is what happens to anybody who does unconfirmed work for long enough without something else underneath it.

You are able to begin the next one without the receipt, and beginning is the thing that keeps the need from growing. The written word tells a person to cast the bread and expressly not to watch the wind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a hand that has started to stall at the end of things.

The honest half. You are still never going to find out. I am not going to tell you that one day somebody will write, because your work is not shaped that way and you know it better than I do.

And the verse does say thou shalt find it after many days, which is a real promise, and I want to be careful with it. It does not say you will find out. It says something comes back. Those are not the same and I am not going to blur them to make you feel better.

There is a part only you can do, and it is the hardest kind of small. Say out loud the specific thing you will never find out. And then start the next piece. In that order, today.