It Was Only Once

The first time Erin did it, she was right, and that is what makes this hard.

She had been owed something. Genuinely owed, not in a grudge way, in a plain arithmetical way that anybody looking at it would have agreed with. There had been a mistake earlier in the month, in the other direction, and nobody had corrected it, and it had cost her, and she had said nothing because saying something would have been more trouble than it was worth.

So when the moment came, she rounded. Slightly. In her own favor, once, to a figure that was not exactly right but was closer to fair than the exactly right one was.

And she was not wrong. If you sat down with her and went through it you would very likely say: well, yes, fine.

That was about four years ago.

She did it again the next month, and that time she thought about it for a second. And the month after that she did not think about it at all, and she could not tell you now when it stopped being a correction and started being a habit, because there was no day. There is never a day.

What there is, four years later, is a woman who does it as a matter of course, in months where nothing has gone wrong, in months where nobody owes her anything, in months where the original grievance has been settled so long it would take her a while to remember what it even was.

She found this out because she was explaining something unrelated to a younger colleague and heard herself say the words "and then I just round it", in a completely ordinary voice, as though describing the weather.

And the colleague nodded and wrote it down.

That is what stopped her. Not guilt about the amount. She could tell you the amount and it is not interesting. What stopped her was watching a person she likes write down, as an instruction, a thing that had started life as one fair correction and had turned into a method without her ever agreeing to it.

Now hear me before you start being hard on yourself, because I can feel a reader doing it.

Erin is not a thief and nothing about her is fraudulent. That word does not belong in this message and I am not going to let it in. She started from a real unfairness and made a small human adjustment that most fair-minded people would have shrugged at, and then time did what time does.

That is the mechanism, and it is worth naming clearly.

A thing that was justified once will keep running long after the justification has gone home.

You have your own version. Something in your life started as a fair response to a genuine situation, and the situation ended years ago, and the response is still going, and you have never revisited it because it never once felt like a decision that needed revisiting.

Nobody is calling you dishonest. Nothing about you is on trial.

Something got sold, quietly, and what was paid for it was not money. It was the ability to describe your own practice out loud without hearing it land strangely.

The scales are about a hand, not a court

There is a proverb about this and it is not about crime.

A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.Proverbs 11:1

Notice the second half, because everybody stops at the first. A just weight is his delight. Delight. Not compliance, not the avoidance of trouble. He is described as taking actual pleasure in a true weight sitting in somebody's hand, which is a strange and lovely thing to say about God and not at all what we expect.

That verse is not written to catch anybody. It is written because a set of scales drifts. Anyone who has ever used real ones knows it: they do not go wrong at once, they go wrong slowly, and the only way anyone finds out is by putting a known weight on them on purpose.

And now hear what is already true of you. You are not being weighed. That is not my reassurance: the written word says there is now no condemnation for those in Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has just heard herself say something out loud and gone quiet.

And your conscience working is a good sign and not a bad one. The word says He writes His law on our hearts, and it is the Spirit who does that writing, so the fact that a sentence landed strangely in your own ears this week is evidence that the writing is there and legible, not evidence that you have gone wrong beyond repair.

What is not being asked of you

I want to be careful now, because this is where a message like this can start giving instructions it has no business giving.

I am not going to tell you what to do about the amount. Not a figure, not a proportion, not a plan, not whether anything needs going back. I do not know your circumstances and I do not know the arrangement, and specific instruction about your money from a message about your soul is exactly the thing this whole site refuses to do.

Nobody is telling you to make a declaration to anybody, or to explain four years to a single person, or to put anything right in a way that costs your household something I will never have to pay.

There may be something to do. There may not be. God is entirely able to say so Himself and He does not need me guessing on His behalf from here.

And I am not naming your work, because there is nothing wrong with your trade. Scales drift in every hand there has ever been. It is not an industry problem, it is a physics problem, and it applies to people.

So hear what is not required. You are not on probation. Nothing in Scripture makes God's welcome wait behind a correction, and the Spirit of God has never once held a person at arm's length until their books balanced.

And the four years have not disqualified you from anything. If we confess, He is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse, says the written word, and the Spirit does the cleansing thoroughly and does not come back later to check up on it.