I Feel Tricked And I Cannot Name By Whom

You keep coming back to the man who sold you the house.

He was perfectly pleasant. He was in his seventies and he had lived there thirty one years and he left you a note about the back door and a spare key in a drawer with a label on it.

And in the last three months you have been over that note about eleven times, looking for what else he could have said and did not.

Then you move on to the agent. Then the inspector, who you have thought about a great deal. Then, in a slightly less reasonable frame of mind, the whole arrangement, the way it is all set up, the fact that a person can buy a house without anybody sitting them down and telling them what a house actually takes.

And then you get to the end and there is nobody there.

There is no defendant. Nobody lied. The old man wrote you a note about the back door and put a labeled key in a drawer, and he was kind, and there is nothing in him to accuse.

And the feeling does not go away just because you cannot name who it belongs to.

A grievance with nobody in the dock

Let me name the thing in this house, because it is specific and it has a shape.

It is a grievance with no defendant.

That is one of the hardest things a person can carry, and it is harder than an ordinary injustice, because an injustice at least has somewhere to go. You can be angry at a man. You can write to him, or decide not to, or forgive him, and any of those is a finished action.

A grievance with nobody in the dock has no finishing move available. It circulates. It goes round the sellers and the agent and the inspector and the whole system, and comes back, and starts again, and it will do that for years if nothing stops it.

You have been circulating a grievance rather than carrying an injustice, and a feeling that cannot find a defendant has never once meant the feeling was invented. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows exactly how much can be foreseen and how much cannot, and it is written in Proverbs 27 that a prudent man foreseeth the evil and hideth himself.

And I want to be fair to the old man for a moment, because your mind has been unfair to him in a way you would not defend out loud.

He lived there thirty one years. The costs arriving in your mail came to him gradually across three decades and became weather. By the end he no longer experienced them as costs of a house; they were simply what a year contained.

He did not withhold a list. There was no list in him to withhold.

You have been searching a kind man for a concealment that was never in him, and thirty one years of ordinary weather has never once been a thing anybody could have handed over in a note. Proverbs 27 praises foresight without pretending everything can be foreseen, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the limit where He put it.

The prudent man foreseeth

Here is the verse, and the honest reading of it is better than the usual one.

A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished. (Proverbs 27:12, King James Version)

That line is usually read as a rebuke to somebody who did not see it coming, and I want to take it apart carefully, because that reading is doing damage in this house.

You have been reading a proverb as a charge against yourself, and a verse about a man on a road has never once been an indictment of a first year owner. Proverbs 27 names one visible trouble rather than every possible one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept the claim that narrow.

Foreseeth the evil. The evil, singular and specific. The prudent man in that proverb sees a particular trouble approaching and gets out of its way. It is a proverb about a visible thing on a road.

It is not a promise that a prudent man foresees everything. It is not a claim that with enough care a person can know in advance what a house will cost across ten years, and Proverbs itself says elsewhere that a man does not know what a day will bring.

You are not the simple man in that verse, and a cost nobody could see approaching has never once been an evil somebody walked past on a road. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept it that specific, and the written word gives foresight about a visible trouble rather than about everything.

And here is the practical thing, which is where the verse does help you.

The prudent man does something. He hides himself. It is an action, not a feeling. The proverb is about behavior in the presence of a known danger.

Which means that everything available to you now is on the action side. What is in front of you is a set of things that can be done, and none of them require you to first find somebody to hold responsible.

You have actions available and no defendant needed, and the finding of a culprit has never once been a step in dealing with a cost. Proverbs 27 puts the prudence in the doing and not in the knowing, and the Spirit of God is the one who moved it there.