Walketh Uprightly Walketh Surely

Eleven years and she cannot point to one thing it changed.

She has been honest. Not heroically. In the ordinary daily grain of it: she says what she actually thinks the timescale is, she does not let a thing go out that she knows is not right, she does not take credit sideways, she has told two people things they did not want to hear and did it kindly.

And the place is exactly as it was.

The same shortcuts happen. The same people get their way. Nothing she has done appears to have shifted anything by an inch, and she is not naive, she never expected to transform anything, but she did expect something. Some accumulation. Some sense that the ledger was pointing somewhere.

She said it out loud for the first time last week, to nobody, in a garden, with her shoes off.

She said: I have been good at this for eleven years and it has made no difference.

And then she felt awful for saying it, because it sounded like she wanted a reward, and she does not want a reward, and she could not have told you what she does want, and that is the actual problem.

You may have your own eleven years. A long stretch of doing it right, that has visibly produced nothing, and a tiredness in you that has no name because the alternative is unthinkable and you would not do it anyway.

What it was producing the whole time

Here is a proverb, and the whole of it is in one small word.

He that walketh uprightly walketh surely: but he that perverteth his ways shall be known.Proverbs 10:9

Walketh surely.

Not walks somewhere. Not arrives. Not is rewarded, or noticed, or vindicated in front of the people who did it the other way. Surely. It is a word about footing. About the quality of the ground under a person as they go.

That is what eleven years of honesty has been producing, and it is invisible for exactly the reason that footing is invisible. You never see it. You only ever notice its absence, at the moment somebody slips.

You have been building something the whole time, and it is under you rather than in front of you. Proverbs 10:9 promises sure footing rather than a visible result, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort instead of a consolation prize.

Let me say what I think you actually want, since you could not name it.

I do not think you want a reward. I think you want the eleven years to have gone somewhere. To have accumulated into something rather than evaporating into an ordinary Tuesday, eleven years running.

They did accumulate. Into you. Into the fact that you can sit in a garden with your shoes off and go over the whole eleven years and find nothing you would want to hide. That is not a small possession. It is the thing most people spend the second half of their lives wishing they had.

You are standing on ground that will hold, and it will hold precisely because of the years that seemed to produce nothing. The written word joins upright walking to sure walking in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit has been laying that under you every ordinary day of it.

The honest half: the place may not change. The shortcuts may go on happening and the same people may go on getting their way and you may retire out of it with the whole thing looking exactly as it looks tonight. I am not going to promise you a turn.

And I am not handing you a verdict on anybody else, because I cannot see their situations and neither can you, and the proverb's second half is God's business rather than yours to administer.

There is a part only you can do. The footing has to be felt. Physically. Because it is the one thing you have been building that you have never once stood on deliberately.