I Have Nothing To Show For It On Paper

You went through it properly in August, with a calculator, at the kitchen table.

Nine years. Every figure. In and out. And at the end of it you sat back and the honest summary was that you are about where you started, adjusted, give or take.

Nine years for give or take.

And here is what happened next, and it is the reason this needs writing.

You started letting that be the answer.

Not deliberately. But somebody asked you in September how it had gone and you said something about it having been a lot of work for not very much, and you meant the figure, and they heard a verdict on nine years, and so, on the drive home, did you.

The ledger has become the description.

And you know it is not the whole thing. You are not a foolish woman and you can list some of what is missing if somebody makes you.

But the ledger has a page and a total and a shape, and what is missing has none of those, and a thing with a total beats a thing without one every single time.

There is a verse about two kinds of looking and it names the problem exactly.

The things which are not seen

Paul writes a sentence about where a person's attention goes.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:18, King James Version)

Look not at the things which are seen. That is an instruction about attention rather than about belief.

He is not saying the visible things are false. He says they are temporal, which means time-bound. Real, and with an end on them.

You have been told where to look rather than what to believe, and the Holy Spirit is the one who directs that looking. 2 Corinthians 4:18 puts the visible in the category of temporary rather than untrue, and He has been directing it since long before August.

Now what that says about the ledger.

The ledger is accurate. Every figure in it is right. It is not lying to you and nobody made an error.

It is temporal, which is a different criticism. It records what is time-bound, because that is what a ledger is built to record, and it has no column at all for the other kind of thing.

You have an accurate document that is structurally unable to hold what you are looking for, and it is written that the seen things are temporal rather than false. The Spirit of God is the one who knows exactly what that page can and cannot contain, and 2 Corinthians 4 names the difference.

And the phrase things which are not seen is worth stopping on, because it is not vague.

Paul is not talking about feelings. He is talking about things. Actual things, which exist, and which are eternal, and whose only distinguishing feature is that they are not visible on a page.

You have things rather than impressions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been making them for nine years. The written word calls them things which are not seen rather than things which are imagined, and 2 Corinthians 4:18 calls them eternal.

The problem is a missing page

Let me be practical, because a woman with a calculator needs something better than encouragement.

The reason the ledger keeps winning is that it exists as an object and the other thing does not.

You can list what is missing if somebody makes you, but a list you can produce under pressure is not the same as a page you keep. It is nowhere. It has no total and no shape and nothing to look at.

So the ledger is not winning because it is true and the other thing is not. It is winning because it is written down.

You have been comparing a document to a memory and calling it a fair comparison, and Scripture puts the unseen things in the category of things rather than of feelings. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a person the actual mechanism of it, and 2 Corinthians 4 is why the unseen is worth writing.

And that is fixable in about forty minutes at the same table.

Write the second page. The one with what is not on the ledger.

A woman who could not look anybody in the eye who now runs a shift. The February the road was closed. The customer who told you what your building had been to her in a particular year. The thing you know about your own steadiness that you did not know at thirty-four.

You are able to give the unseen a page rather than leaving it in a memory, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did all of the making. It is written that the unseen things are the eternal ones, and 2 Corinthians 4:18 is why it deserves paper.

Write the second page

So here is the thing to do, and it is at the same table, and it takes about forty minutes.

Write the second page. Everything that is not on the ledger and cannot be. By hand.

Do not total it. There is no total and trying to make one will ruin it.

Then keep the two pages together, in the same place.

You are giving the unseen a shape rather than an argument, and 2 Corinthians 4:18 calls those things eternal. The Spirit of God is the one who receives the second page, and He was present for every line on it.

The reason they go in the same place is that the next time somebody asks how it went, and somebody will, there will be two documents rather than one.

And you will answer differently. Not because you have decided to be positive, but because a woman with two pages gives a different answer from a woman with one, and it is not a decision she has to make in the moment.

You have two pages available rather than a better attitude, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been filling the second page for nine years. The written word puts the eternal in the things which are not seen, and 2 Corinthians 4:18 is where the looking gets directed.

Then open in the morning and go on running the place the way you run it.