What The Fear Has Been Costing

Wendell keeps a folder, and everything in the folder is a thing that might go wrong.

The truck. The roof. The knee that will need doing eventually. The stretch of fence out past the creek that has been one hard winter away from coming down for six years now. He has a policy for most of it and a plan for the rest, and if you want to know what a careful man looks like at sixty-three, that is him, and I am not going to stand here and tell you he is doing it wrong.

He is not doing it wrong. He grew up with a father who had one bad October and never got out from under it, and a boy who watches that does not come out of it casual.

But there was an evening in March, out on Sutter Road, where he had to pull over.

He had come from a funeral. A man he had known since school, four years younger than him, gone in eleven weeks. And driving home in the dark with the heater going, Wendell got to thinking about a thing he had wanted since he was about twenty-five, which was to take his boy and his boy's boy up into the high country for a week, no phones, and teach the little one to read water the way his own daddy taught him on the Nolichucky.

He has been saying that for thirty-eight years.

He has never once put a dollar behind it. Not one. Not a deposit, not a saved-up jar on the shelf, nothing, and there has been money in that house every single one of those years.

Meanwhile the folder has been fed every month, faithfully, without a gap, for four decades.

He sat on the shoulder with the flashers on for about ten minutes and then he drove home and did not say anything to anybody.

Now, I want to be plain, because this is the exact place a message like this goes wrong and starts kicking a man for being sensible.

There is nothing sinful in that folder. Wisdom keeps a roof over people. Scripture has hard words for the man who will not look ahead, and Wendell has looked ahead for forty years and there is not a soul in his family who has ever gone without a thing because of it.

That is not the problem. That was never the problem.

The problem is that if you took Wendell's statement and handed it to a stranger who had never met him, and asked that stranger to write down what this man cares about, the stranger would come back with a list of things Wendell is afraid of.

And it would be a good list. Accurate. Thorough.

And the high country would not be on it. Neither would the boy. Neither would the water on the Nolichucky, or the week, or the one thing he has been saying out loud since Carter was in office.

You have your own version of this, and it will not be a fence line past a creek. But there is a page somewhere with your name on it, and it is a very careful page, and it is a record of what you are bracing for and not of what you came here to love.

Nobody is calling that page cowardly. It might be the most responsible thing you ever did.

It is just that the fear has been getting fed on a schedule, and the love has been living on talk.

The prophet did not scold them for working

There is an old word for this and it is not gentle, but it is not aimed where you think.

Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.Haggai 1:6

Now the crowd he said that to were not lazy. That is the part everybody misses. They were working themselves half to death. They had panelled houses and standing crops and full days, and the prophet does not say one word against a single one of those things.

He says: consider your ways. Look at where it is going, because you have been running a long time and you cannot tell me what you have been running toward.

And hear what is already settled over you before we go a step further, because this is the ground the rest of it stands on. You are not condemned for one line in that folder. That is not my kindness talking, it is what the written word says over anybody in Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes a man's shoulders come down when he reads it. Caution is not sin. Prudence is not faithlessness. Nobody here is going to tell you that insuring a roof means you did not trust God, because that is a stupid thing to say and it has hurt a lot of good people.

The word is not stop looking after your house. The word is look at where it is all going, and then say out loud what you find.

The verse runs downhill, not up

Now here is the part that changes a man's week, and near everybody has it backwards.

We say it like the Lord told us: get your heart straightened out, and then the money will follow. Which puts the whole load on manufacturing a feeling, and a man of sixty-three driving home from a funeral in the dark cannot manufacture a feeling. He is empty.

That is not the order He gave it in. Where the treasure is, the heart goes and settles. The treasure first. The heart walks along behind it like a dog following a wagon.

You are not locked out behind a feeling you cannot raise. That is the plain direction of the written word, and the Holy Spirit put it in that order on purpose, because He has watched a great many tired men try to love something into existence at the end of a long day and He knows how that goes.

You move one thing. The heart comes on after. It does not need to be told twice.

And hear this too, because it is the piece Wendell needed on that shoulder in March. You have not lost thirty-eight years. God is the one who says He restores the years the locusts ate, and His Spirit is well able to hand a man a week in the high country at sixty-three that would not have meant half as much at twenty-five. Nothing about that trip has expired. There is a boy and there is a boy's boy and there is still water running down out of those mountains.