Six Years And Further Away Than We Started

You did the sum again in August and you have not done it since.

That is the pattern now. Every few months one of you opens it, and works out where you are, and compares that to what is needed, and the gap is bigger than it was the last time you looked, and then neither of you mentions it for a while.

Six years.

You have not been careless. That is the part that makes this hard to talk about with people who have not lived it. You have saved consistently, through two years when it was genuinely difficult, and the amount you have put away is real and you did without things to do it.

And the thing you are saving toward has moved faster than you have.

Let me say what this article will not do, before you spend twenty minutes on it.

I am not going to tell you the money is coming.

Nothing here will suggest that if you keep going God will make up the difference, or that provision is on its way, or that the right amount of faith closes a gap of that size. If somebody has told you that, they handed you a bill and told you God would pay it, and when the money did not arrive you would not blame the advice. You would blame yourself, and that wound outlasts a house.

So there is no promise in this article. None.

What there is instead is a correction to your arithmetic, and it is a real one, and it is not a trick.

You have been measuring the wrong quantity for six years.

Two quantities, and you only ever check one

Here is the correction, and it is simple enough that it is easy to dismiss before it has done its work.

There are two numbers in this. There is the gap, which is what is still needed. And there is the total, which is what has actually been put away.

Every few months, somebody opens the account. And what happens in the next four seconds is always the same: the eye lands on the balance, travels straight past it to the target, and reports back on the distance. The distance is the only thing that ever gets measured.

You have been running an audit that only ever reads one of the two numbers, and six years of saving has never once been the thing that failed here. Luke 14 has a man sitting down to count what he has before he builds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who thinks the counting is worth doing properly.

And the distance has grown. That is true and I am not going to soften it. But watch what that one habit costs you, because it is not neutral.

The total has grown every single year, including the two hard ones. It has never gone backward. In six years of a difficult decade, two people with ordinary jobs have taken an amount of money out of the reach of every pressure in modern life and kept it there.

Nobody has ever once said that sentence to you, including you.

You have done something for six years that most people cannot do for six months, and a moving target has never once erased the thing you actually did. The written word tells a builder to sit down and count what he has in hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not measure a household by a gap.

Sitteth down first and counteth

Here is the passage, and it is usually read as a warning and it is also a description of what counting is for.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? (Luke 14:28, King James Version)

Sitteth down first, and counteth the cost.

Notice what is actually in that picture. A man sits down. He is not running. He is not glancing at something on a phone while the kettle boils. He gives it his attention, deliberately, and he counts.

And he counts two things, because you cannot answer that question with one of them. He counts what the tower will cost, and he counts what he has.

You have been doing half of what the verse describes, and half a count has never once been able to tell anybody where they actually are. Luke 14 names both quantities in a single sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the having and the needing side by side.

And there is something else in the picture that I do not want you to miss. The man in the parable is not condemned for not having enough. Read it again. The warning is about starting without knowing, and not about the size of the pile.

Jesus does not tell that man he lacked faith. He tells him to sit down and find out where he stands.

You are permitted to know exactly where you stand without that being despair, and an honest number has never once been the same as giving up. It is written that a man sitteth down first and counteth, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an honest number safe to look at.