The Youngest One Asked Me If This Is Fair

She is seventeen and she asked you on a Thursday.

Is this fair.

That was the whole question. She was not being clever and she was not complaining and she had clearly been thinking about it for a while before she said it out loud.

And you gave her about forty words that added up to nothing.

You said something about how things get decided and about how it works the same for everybody and about how it is not really about fair, and she nodded and went back to work, and you knew while you were saying it that she had asked something and you had answered something else.

She is not stupid. That is the thing to hold onto here.

A seventeen year old who asks a direct question and gets forty words of fog learns something from the fog, and what she learns is not about the policy.

She learns that this is a place where direct questions get met with a certain kind of answer, and that is a lesson she will carry into the next forty years of working for people.

Eight days now. You have not gone back.

There is a verse about plain speech and it is shorter and more demanding than most people remember.

Yea, yea; Nay, nay

Jesus says something about how a person should talk and it is very compressed.

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. (Matthew 5:37, King James Version)

Yes means yes and no means no. That is the instruction.

And then the clause on the end: whatsoever is more than these. More than a plain yes or a plain no. That is what He is warning about.

You have been given the shortest instruction about speech in the book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is that direct. Matthew 5:37 warns about what gets added rather than about what gets said, and He has been present in eight days of a Thursday that did not get answered.

Now let me be careful, because this verse can be turned into a cruelty and it is not one.

It does not require anybody to disclose everything. It does not say answer every question fully. It says let your yes be yes.

Which means the requirement is about the quality of what is said, not about the quantity.

You are not required to tell her everything, and it is written that the fault is in what gets added beyond a plain answer. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that distinction, and Matthew 5 puts the warning on the padding rather than on the boundaries.

And here is what that says about the forty words.

The forty words were the more than these. That is exactly what they were. There was a plain thing available and it got covered over with a lot of reasonable-sounding material.

The reasonable-sounding material is the part the verse is uneasy about, and you felt that while it was leaving your mouth.

You have known it since the moment it happened rather than working it out afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gave you that sense in the moment. Scripture puts the trouble in whatsoever is more than these, and Matthew 5:37 is why it registered.

There is a true half

So what is the plain answer to is this fair.

Here is the thing. There probably is one, and it is probably not a full yes and not a full no, and that is fine, because a plain answer can have a shape.

No, I do not think that part is fair, and it is the rule and we run it. That is a plain answer.

I do not know whether it is fair and I have wondered the same thing. That is a plain answer.

It is fair in a way that is hard to see from where you are standing, and here is the bit of it I can explain. That is a plain answer too.

You have several plain answers available rather than one, and it is written that the yes should be a yes rather than a paragraph. The Spirit of God is the one who will show you which of them is actually true, and Matthew 5:37 asks only for the plain version of whatever it is.

And there is one more piece, which is the part you may be permitted to say and may not.

If there is genuinely something you cannot tell her, say that. There is a part of this I cannot answer is itself a plain answer, and it is a yes-and-no shaped sentence, and a seventeen year old can hold it.

What she cannot hold is forty words that mean nothing, because that leaves her nowhere to stand and nothing to do.

You are able to say what you cannot say, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person that sentence. The written word never once treated a boundary as the same thing as a fog, and Matthew 5:37 is why the plain version is worth more than the padded one.

Give her the true half

So here is the thing to do, and it is this week, and it is shorter than what you said on Thursday.

Go back to her. Say: you asked me something on Thursday and I gave you a lot of words. Here is the actual answer.

Then give her the true half, whatever it is. Ten words. Twelve.

Then say, if it applies, that there is a part you cannot answer.

You are giving a plain answer rather than a full account, and Matthew 5:37 asks for the yes and the no rather than for the whole story. The Spirit of God is the one present in it, and He is not asking you to disclose one thing you should not.

The reason to go back rather than to do better next time is that she is seventeen and this is one of the first working relationships of her life, and the lesson from Thursday is currently the lesson.

Ten words this week replaces it. And she will remember, for a long time, that she asked a hard question in her first job and got a real answer.

You have ten words that will outlast this arrangement in somebody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes something land in a seventeen year old for thirty years. It is written that whatsoever is more than a plain yes or no is the part to be wary of, and Matthew 5 is where the plainness is asked for.

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