Seven Times And Riseth Up

He is twice as careful as he was and he gets about half as much done.

That started as a correction and it was a good one. Something went wrong, it was his, it cost, and afterwards he tightened up. Anybody would.

That was fourteen months ago and the tightening has not stopped tightening.

He now checks things that do not need checking. He asks for confirmations he would never have asked for. He has a way of standing over a decision for a long time before making it, and the decision is almost always the one he would have made in four seconds two years ago, and it is now taking him half an hour and it wears him out.

The men who work with him have noticed. Nobody has said anything, but one of them has started making certain calls without asking him, which is either kindness or something else and he cannot tell which.

And here is what he cannot work out, and it goes round: is this wisdom or is this fear.

Because it looks like wisdom. It uses all the same words. It produces careful work, at half the rate, by a man who is exhausted, and he cannot find the line between having learned something and having been damaged by something.

You may know that bench. A carefulness that started as a good correction and has kept growing, and no way to tell from inside whether it is wisdom.

The number is seven

Here is a proverb, and the arithmetic in it is the point.

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.Proverbs 24:16

Seven times.

Not once. The just man in that sentence has a pattern of falling, repeatedly, across a life, and he is still called just. The falling is not what disqualifies him.

And what defines him is the second half: riseth up again. Not falls less. Not becomes so careful that he stops falling. Rises.

That is a picture of somebody who is up and moving and therefore able to fall, which is a different creature from somebody who has stopped moving in order to be safe.

You are described in that verse as a just man, and the falling is inside the description. Proverbs 24:16 counts seven falls and calls the man just anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man of fifty four stop reading his own record as a disqualification.

Now let me try to give you the line you have been looking for, because I think there is one.

Care asks: what does this thing need. Fear asks: what would protect me. Both produce checking. They produce different amounts of it, and only one of them ever finishes.

Care is finite. It looks at the job, decides what the job requires, does that, and stops. Fear has no stopping condition, because no amount of protection is ever demonstrably enough, and so it keeps going and calls itself thoroughness the whole way.

Fourteen months of something that has not stopped growing is not care. Care would have leveled off.

You are able to tell the difference by whether it ever finishes. The written word puts rising rather than not falling at the center of the just man, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of a carefulness with no floor in it.

The honest half. The thing that happened was real and it was yours and it cost. I am not going to tell you the correction was unnecessary, because it was necessary. Some of what you learned you should keep.

And I am not going to say God arranged it to make you more careful. He did not. It was a mistake, of the kind everybody who does anything makes.

There is a part only you can do, and it will be uncomfortable. One decision, today, at the ordinary speed, made the way you would have made it two years ago. And then not gone back to.