The Number You Set After The Bad Year

Kai's figure was set by a man who had not slept properly in four months, and Kai has been obeying him ever since.

That man was Kai, seven years ago. He would not entirely recognize him now, which is the point.

The year does not need describing in detail and I am not going to make you sit through somebody else's disaster. It is enough to say that several things went wrong close together, in an order that gave him no room between them, and that at the worst of it he was doing arithmetic at three in the morning about how long things would last.

And somewhere in that stretch, in a kitchen with the light off, he set a number.

Not deliberately. There was no moment where he decided. But he came out the other side of that year with an amount in him, and the amount was the answer to a question that was very live at three in the morning, which was: how much would it take for this never to be able to happen again.

That is the figure he has been serving for seven years.

He is fine now, and that is not a small word, it is the whole situation. It has been fine for a long time. There is work and there is a house and there are people, and by any measure a stranger would use, Kai came out of that year and rebuilt and it held.

But nobody has ever gone back and asked the man in the kitchen whether his number still applies.

He worked this out on a headland at somebody's birthday, sitting slightly apart with a plate he was not eating from, and what he thought was not complicated. He thought: that figure was set by somebody in shock, and I have never once revised it, and I would not let a man in that state choose a car for me.

Now, I want to stay right here for a moment and not hurry past it, because there is a wound in this and hurrying past a wound is how a message becomes useless.

What happened to Kai was real. It was not a lesson and it was not a test and I am not going to tell you it was sent to teach him something, because I do not know that and nobody does, and people who say that sort of thing at funerals should be gently led away.

And the man in that kitchen was not weak. He was doing exactly what a mind is supposed to do when the ground moves: he was making a rule so that it could not happen again. That is not a failure. It is a defense, and it worked, and it got him through.

The only trouble is that a defense built in an emergency is built to emergency specifications, and it does not know when the emergency is over, because nothing ever tells it.

You have your own version. There is a figure in you, and if you trace it back it was probably set in a specific season, and if you are honest the person who set it was not at their best.

Nobody is calling you traumatized or fragile. You survived a thing and you built something afterwards.

The rule has just never been reviewed by anybody who is not frightened.

The promise is about the middle, not the shore

There is a verse people put on cards, and the grammar of it is much better than the cards make it look.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.Isaiah 43:2

When, not if. He does not promise the water will not come, and anybody who tells you He did has not read the sentence.

And through is a traveling word. He is not describing a rescue from the bank; He is describing company in the middle of it, which is a much stranger and better promise than the one we usually want.

Which means, and this is the part that bears directly on a figure set at three in the morning, that He was in the kitchen.

You were not alone in that year. That is not my kindness: the written word says I will be with thee, and it is spoken about the passage rather than about the far side, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man sitting slightly apart on a headland with a plate he is not eating.

And you were carried through it. Not by the figure. The figure had not been reached and could not have helped. Whatever brought you out of that year was not arithmetic, says the plain evidence of your own life, and the word calls Him the God of all comfort who comforteth us in all our tribulation, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a memory a man can actually stand on rather than a thing he was told afterwards.

Nobody is coming for your defenses

I want to be extremely plain now, because this is where a message like this tells somebody who has already lost things once to put down the thing that makes them feel safe, and that would be a cruel and stupid instruction and I am not giving it.

Nobody here is telling you to reduce anything. Not the figure, not the buffer, not the arrangements. After a year like yours, building is not fear, it is competence, and a great many people are steadier now because you did it.

I am not going to name a number for you. I do not know what you carry, who leans on you, or what your year actually cost, and a man naming somebody else's safe figure from a page has understood nothing.

And I am not going to tell you it cannot happen again. That is a promise I have no right to make. Nobody on this site will ever sell you a guarantee about your circumstances, and if anybody does, close the page.

What is being said is only this: the specification was written in an emergency, and the emergency ended some years ago, and the specification has never once been shown the calendar.

And you are not the man in that kitchen. Not because you got over it, and not because it was not serious: the word says if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, and it is the Spirit who makes that a lived fact rather than a slogan, which is why the man on the headland could see the man in the kitchen from a distance and feel sorry for him.