We Did Everything Right And Lost It

You have not slept properly since the Thursday, and it is not the house that keeps you awake.

It is the audit.

You run it at about two in the morning and it always starts in the same place. You should have gone in higher. You should not have asked about the fence. You should have written the letter, the one your cousin said to write, about who you are and what the house would be for. You should have been faster on the Tuesday, and you were not faster on the Tuesday because you wanted to talk to your wife first, and now that conversation has become the reason you lost a house.

Then you get to the end of the audit and you start it again from the top.

And you know, in the daylight, what the agent actually said. He said the sellers took a cash offer. He said it was not about the number. He said there was nothing you could have put on the table that would have changed it, because what they wanted was to be out by the end of the month and no financing anywhere can do that.

You know that. You have known it since the Thursday.

And the audit keeps running anyway, because at two in the morning your mind would rather you be guilty than helpless, and it will spend the whole night manufacturing a mistake in order to avoid the other thing.

What the audit is actually for

Let me name what your mind is doing, because it is doing something clever and it is doing it for a kind reason.

If you made a mistake, then the world still works the way you need it to work. Effort in, result out. Do the right things and get the house. A mistake is terrible news about you and wonderful news about the universe, and at two in the morning you will take that trade every time.

The alternative is worse. The alternative is that you did everything correctly and it still went to somebody else, which means the connection between doing it right and getting it is looser than you had been living as though it was.

So your mind builds a mistake. It has been building one for nine nights.

You are running an audit on a decision that was never the hinge, and the fence question has never once been the reason a stranger picked somebody else. It is written in Ecclesiastes that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting up at two in the morning with a man who cannot find the error because there is not one.

And notice what your family have been saying, because they are trying to help and they are doing the same thing from the other side. Your cousin says you should have written the letter. Your brother says the market is mad. Your mother says the right one is out there. Every one of those sentences is a small attempt to get the world back to making sense.

You were doing the thing properly the whole way through, and being outrun by cash has never once been a failure of character. The word says plainly that time and chance happeneth to them all, and it is the Spirit of God who keeps that sentence in the book rather than letting somebody replace it with a lesson.

What Ecclesiastes refuses to explain

Here is the verse, and I want you to watch how little it comforts.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version)

Read what that is doing.

It is not a promise. It is not a consolation. It is a man who has looked hard at how outcomes actually land and has reported back, in writing, that the fastest runner does not always win the race, and he does not soften it afterward.

There is no clause explaining why. There is no reassurance that the slow runner gets something better. There is no instruction to run harder next time. It states the fact and it moves down the page.

And there is something in that which none of the kind sentences you have heard this week can do. It does not require the world to be fair in order to be true, and it does not require you to have made a mistake in order to explain what happened to you.

You have been handed a verse that admits out loud what your family cannot say, and needing the world to make sense has never once made you weak. The Spirit of God is the one who put a sentence that blunt into the book, and the written word carries it without a single softening clause after it.

The audit wants a cause. Ecclesiastes says, sometimes there is time, and sometimes there is chance, and a wise man can watch a slower man cross the line first.

That is not fatalism. The same book will tell you to work with your might and to take counsel. It simply refuses to lie to you about the gap between doing it well and getting it.

You have done the work well, and a good process has never once been proof that a good outcome was owed to you. The written word says the race is not to the swift, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding a man steady while he lets that sentence be true.