The Arithmetic You Do In The Car

She does it at the lights on the way out of town, and it takes about the length of one red, and she has been doing it for years.

It is not dramatic and there is no crisis. That has to be said clearly at the start, because a story with a crisis in it is easier to tell and this is not that. Nobody is going without. The bills are met. There is food and there is heating and the children are, by any historical or global measure, extremely well off.

What she does at the lights is simply run the numbers.

She thinks about the school trip that came up in February, the one where she said, quite naturally, that it looked expensive and asked whether it was really worth it, and watched her daughter agree far too quickly.

She thinks about the back tire, which she knows about and has known about since October.

She thinks about her sister, who does not work harder than she does and who took her family somewhere warm in the spring and posted a photograph of it, and she thinks about the fact that she felt something small and unwelcome when she saw that photograph, and then she thinks about having felt it, which is the part that goes round twice.

And then the light changes.

Here is what has grown over the years and is the actual weight in this. She has decided that doing the arithmetic at all is a failure. She has taught, more than once, on not being anxious. She believes it. And so every time the sums start at a set of lights she experiences it as a small private lapse, and adds it to a running total of lapses, and the total is now considerably heavier than any of the numbers she was adding up in the first place.

She has never said any of it out loud, because saying it out loud in her world would sound like a complaint about a calling she chose and would choose again.

What He actually says the Father is doing

I want to be careful with this passage, because it is one of the most misused in the Bible and I am not going to misuse it at you. It does not promise anybody an amount. It does not say that a person who trusts enough gets a warm holiday or a new tire. Anybody who has told you that has done you harm and this message will not repeat it.

Here is what it says.

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.Matthew 6:31-32

Look at where the sentence lands. Not on a supply. On a knowing.

Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need. That is the whole of the assurance offered in that verse, and it is offered as though it were enormous, which tells you something about how the One saying it understood a household's needs.

And look at the phrase take no thought. In the Greek behind it, it is a word about being pulled apart, divided, distracted in several directions at once. It is not a prohibition on arithmetic. Jesus is not banning a person from knowing what a tire costs.

So hear this, at a set of lights on the way out of town: the sums are not a sin, and you are not failing at anything when they start. That is not my leniency; it is what His word is actually saying about the difference between knowing your situation and being torn apart by it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a distinction that fine and lifts a running total off a woman who has been keeping it for years.

Now let me get at the total, because the total is doing more damage than the numbers.

You have been adding up your own lapses for years. Every red light adds one. And the effect of that is that a perfectly ordinary act of noticing what things cost has been converted into evidence about your spiritual condition, filed, and carried. The Holy Spirit is what turns a sentence that is true into a sentence that is true about you.

That is not conviction. Conviction is specific, it is about something you did, and it comes with a way out. What you have been carrying is a general and permanent verdict with no exit, and Scripture never once produces that in a person.

You are not anxious in the sense the passage means. His word draws the line at being pulled apart, and a woman who does one red light of arithmetic and then drives to work is not a woman being torn in pieces, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been keeping your tally.

And now the thing about the photograph, because you have gone round twice on it and you should be let off.

You felt something small when you saw it. Of course you did. That is not envy taking root, that is a human being with a back tire looking at a beach. What you did next was notice it, dislike it, and refuse it, all inside about four seconds, and that sequence is not a failure of the heart. It is a heart working.

I will not promise you money. Nothing in this message and nothing in that passage does, and a promise like that would be a lie and would put a toll booth in front of your peace. What Scripture says is that the Father knows, and knowing is His, and it is not conditional on how well you manage a set of traffic lights.