They That Deal Truly

They want it Thursday. That is not unreasonable of them. They have reasons and the reasons are real.

And he knows exactly what Thursday costs, because he has been doing this for twenty six years and he can see the shape of it the way you can see that a load is going to shift.

It is not that it will fail. It will be fine. It will be fine for about two years, and then somebody who is not in this conversation, in a place none of these people will ever visit, will be standing in front of it on a bad morning with a problem that did not have to exist.

He can see that person. He cannot describe them, he does not know their name, but he can see them the way you see weather coming.

He has said something, in the way you can. He was careful about it. It was heard, and it was weighed, and Thursday is still Thursday, and the people who decided that are not villains and are working with pressures he can only partly see.

So here he is, at three in the afternoon in a loud room, holding the whole thing.

And what is eating him is not the deadline. It is that he cannot tell whether the tiredness he feels is conscience or just being fifty four and tired. He has run out of a way to tell.

You may know that afternoon. Something you can see coming that other people cannot, no way to make it visible, and a weariness you cannot categorize.

What He delights in

Here is a proverb that pairs two things, and the second half is warmer than people notice.

Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight.Proverbs 12:22

They that deal truly.

Not they that win the argument. Not they that change the decision. Not they that get the deadline moved. The people who deal truly, which is a phrase about conduct in a transaction, about how you handle the part of it that is in your hands.

And what it says about them is that they are His delight. That is a word about pleasure, not about approval. He enjoys it.

You are somebody God takes actual pleasure in when you deal truly, and that has nothing to do with whether Thursday moves. Proverbs 12:22 makes truthful dealing His delight in the same breath as it names lying lips, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a warm thing rather than a standard you are failing.

I want to say something about the person you can see in two years, because you are not wrong to see them.

That is what twenty six years does. It is the same faculty that lets you price a job or hear a fault: you have built a model of how things go, and it shows you the far end of a decision before anybody else has thought about it. It is a real perception and it is one of the more valuable things a person can have.

But a perception is not authority. You can see it. You have said it, carefully, and it was heard and weighed and the decision went the other way. And now you are holding the whole outcome as though the seeing made you responsible for it, and it did not.

You are responsible for what you deal in, and you have dealt truly. The written word puts the delight on the dealing and not on the result, and the Holy Spirit does not put the weight of a room's decision onto the one man in it who could see furthest.

And I am not going to tell you to go back and press it again, or to take it further, or to make a stand. I cannot see your workplace, your obligations, your household or what a stand would actually cost, and a message that decides that for you from a distance would be doing something reckless with a stranger's life.

What is yours is narrower and it is real. There will be a corner today that is genuinely in your own hands, that nobody would ever check, and that you can keep. That one is not a matter of authority. It is a matter of your hands.

The honest half: the thing may still be standing in front of that person in two years, exactly as you saw it, and you may never hear about it. That is genuinely possible and I am not going to smooth it over. What is not true is that it will be your account.