I Am Still Paying Off Last Year

There is a payment leaving your account every month for a day that finished nine months ago.

Nobody in your house knows that. One person might suspect it. Nobody knows the actual figure, or how many months are left, or that you worked out in about March exactly when it clears and that the date is later than anybody would guess.

And now the messages have started. Somebody has asked about dates. Somebody else has said the thing they always say about how it is the one time of year everybody is together. And you have said yes to a couple of things already, in a light voice, while doing arithmetic behind your eyes that came out badly.

I want to be careful with you here, because I suspect you have been handled badly on this subject before, if not by people then by things you have read.

Nobody is going to tell you what to spend. Nobody at this distance knows your household, your income, your obligations or what is reasonable in your situation, and a stranger who starts giving you a rule about money is a stranger you should stop reading.

What I want to talk about is not the money. It is the fact that you are the only person alive who knows the number, and that carrying a number alone is a separate weight from owing it.

I know both how to be abased

There is a sentence Paul writes from a prison cell about money, and the striking thing is which word he uses about himself.

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. (Philippians 4:12, King James Version)

I am instructed. Not I have risen above it. Not I have stopped noticing. Instructed, which is the word a man uses about something he was taught, over time, usually the hard way, usually while it was happening.

And abased is not a gentle word. It means brought low. He is not describing a modest season; he is describing being on the floor about money, and he says it in a letter that people read out loud in churches.

That is the register I want for this conversation. Not shame, and not pretending. A man who has been brought low about money and says so plainly in writing.

You are being taught something in this, and being brought low has never once been the same thing as being disgraced. The Spirit of God is the one who lands an ancient sentence about abasing on a man in a parking lot doing arithmetic, and Philippians 4:12 calls it instruction where a man would have called it failure.

Notice too that he sets abased and abound side by side, as two conditions he has been in, without a verdict attached to either one.

You have been in one of those two conditions for nine months, and nowhere in that verse is it treated as evidence about your character. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a verdict off a bank balance, and Philippians 4:12 sets abasing and abounding side by side as two things a man is taught in.

What carrying it alone does

Let me name the specific weight, because I do not think it is the debt.

Money has been handled before. Most men in your position have been tight at various points and got through it. The thing that is different this time is that nobody knows.

A number that nobody else has heard grows. It stops being a figure and becomes a fact about you. It gets into the way you answer an ordinary question about dates. It makes you slightly false in conversations that have nothing to do with money, because there is one subject you are steering around and steering takes attention.

You are carrying a true thing about your own situation entirely alone, and what is actually there has never once needed to be hidden to be survivable. The Spirit of God is present in a conversation a man has been avoiding for nine months, and Philippians 4:12 has Paul state his own condition plainly rather than manage anybody's impression of him.

And here is the second thing. Because nobody knows the number, every decision you make about the coming day looks, from the outside, like a preference. When you say you would rather keep it small, people hear a mood. They hear a man being funny about it, or tired, or difficult. They cannot hear a number, because you have never said one.

That is not their failure. They are not withholding understanding. They do not have the information.

You have been read as difficult by people who were never given the information, and that has never once been a failure of love in anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who is there when a man stops being misread and starts being understood, and Philippians 4:12 exists at all because a man wrote his actual condition down.

One number, one person

So here is what I am asking, and notice how narrow it is.

Not a family meeting. Not a conversation about the arrangements. Not a decision about what you spend.

Say the true number out loud to one person who will not repeat it.

That is the whole of it. The figure. The number of months left. Said once, to one human being, in an ordinary voice.

You are not asking for anything and you are not confessing anything, and ending the solitude of a number has never once been the same thing as asking for help. The Spirit of God steadies a man's voice while he says a figure out loud for the first time, and it is written into Philippians 4:12 that a man may say plainly he has known what it is to suffer need.

I want to say what this is not, because you may be bracing for it. It is not a step toward getting help. You may want help and you may not, and that is entirely yours. It is not the beginning of a plan. It is not telling the household.

It is one person hearing a true figure, so that there is one place in your life where the arithmetic behind your eyes is not a secret.

You have carried yours privately for nine months, and the Holy Spirit carries what a man has finally said out loud. Philippians 4:12 was never once a private note, and Scripture puts a plain account of being brought low into a letter written to be read by other people.