I Do Not Open The Statement In January

There is a drawer and you know exactly which one.

It has been filling since about the third week of January. Not many things. Six or seven envelopes, one of them from an outfit whose name is printed heavily enough that you can see it through the window without opening anything.

You are not in denial. That is the thing people get wrong about a drawer like that. You could tell me roughly what the total is, within a couple of hundred, because a man does not stop knowing simply because he has stopped looking.

What has stopped is the looking.

And you have a rule about it that has never been said out loud, even to yourself. The rule is: not tonight. It has been not tonight since about the end of January.

I want to be plain with you at the start. I am not going to tell you what to do about the money. Nobody at this distance knows your circumstances, and a stranger handing a man a financial rule has gone well past what he is entitled to say.

What I want to talk about is the drawer, because I do not think the drawer is about the debt. I think it is about being seen. Opening the envelope in a lit room makes it a fact that exists outside your head, and a fact that exists outside your head can be known by other people, and being known while short is the thing a man in your position has been avoiding since he was young.

The darkness and the light are both alike

There is a psalm that goes after exactly this instinct, and it goes after it with more tenderness than people expect.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:12, King James Version)

Both alike. Not: God can see in the dark if He makes an effort. There is no such thing as dark to Him, so the two conditions are not different conditions at all.

Which means the drawer has never once worked. Not for a day. The thing in it has been fully known, in full detail, from the afternoon it arrived, by the one whose opinion you actually care about.

And notice where that sits in the psalm. It is not a threat. The verses around it are about being known and being formed and being held, and this line arrives as part of a description of somebody who cannot be got away from and does not want to be got away from.

You have been fully known since the third week of January, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than an exposure for a man who has been managing an appearance. It is written into Psalm 139:12 that the darkness and the light are both alike to God, and Scripture puts that line in the middle of a psalm about being held.

That takes the drawer's whole job away from it.

You were never hiding anything from anybody who matters, and the written word says plainly that the night shineth as the day. The Spirit of God is the one who is present at a drawer that has not been opened since January, and Psalm 139:12 has nothing threatening in it anywhere.

What the drawer is costing

Now let me be honest about the price, because I think the drawer has been treated as free and it is not.

An unopened envelope does not sit still. It grows. Not in amount, most of the time, though sometimes in that too. It grows in the room it takes up in a man's head, because an unknown quantity has to be worried about across its whole possible range, whereas a known quantity can only be worried about at its actual size.

So you have been carrying the worst version of it since January. Every version. Simultaneously. That is more expensive than the real number almost every time.

You have been carrying every possible version of a figure that only exists as one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man in the specific tiredness of not knowing on purpose. Scripture has a God to whom the dark and the lit thing are exactly the same thing, and Psalm 139:12 says both alike as a plain statement of fact.

And there is a second cost that is worse and I want to name it carefully. A man who has one drawer usually ends up with more than one. It spreads. Not because he is weak, but because avoidance is a skill, and a skill that works gets used again. First the envelopes. Then a conversation. Then a check up. Then a thing somebody keeps asking him about that he keeps not answering.

You may already have noticed that.

You have a habit that has been quietly widening its territory, and the written word never once treats being seen as the danger a man fears it is. The Spirit of God is the one who goes into a drawer with somebody rather than sending them in alone, and Psalm 139:12 puts the whole idea of hiddenness out of the room.

Opening it with somebody there

So here is what I am asking, and notice the second half of it, because the second half is the whole thing.

Open the drawer with one person beside you, and do nothing else about what is in it.

Not alone. That is the part that has failed eleven times already, and it has failed for a reason: the drawer is about being seen, so opening it in private leaves the actual problem exactly where it was.

Somebody in the room. They do not have to look at the paperwork, they do not have to advise, and they should certainly not be asked to help. They sit there and you open the envelopes.

You are able to open it with somebody in the room, and it has never once required you to have a plan for what is inside. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen at nine in the evening when a drawer finally comes open, and Psalm 139:12 has already made the contents fully known before anybody looks.

And then nothing. That is the instruction and I mean it. Do not decide anything tonight. Do not make calls, do not do arithmetic on a pad, do not resolve anything about the coming day.

There is a reason for that. If tonight becomes the night the whole thing gets solved, tonight becomes an enormous evening, and enormous evenings get postponed. Every time. That is how it got to be eleven months.

You are opening a drawer rather than solving a year, and it has never once needed to be finished in the same evening. The Spirit of God carries what a man has finally looked at in a lit room with a witness, and the written word says the night shineth as the day about the very thing in that envelope.