One Inch

Camille has a rule, and she is proud of the rule, and she has been applying it faithfully for eleven years to a line that is not where it used to be.

The rule itself is fine. It is a good rule. She could state it to you in one sentence and you would nod, and it is the kind of thing she is known for and the reason a certain kind of person comes to her for advice.

The trouble is not the rule. The trouble is the mark it measures from.

Because there was a situation, once, that genuinely did not fit. It was not a loophole and she was not looking for one. It was a real case with real people in it where the rule as written would have produced a stupid and unkind outcome, and Camille, who is not a fool, saw that clearly and moved the line about an inch to accommodate it.

She was right. Anybody sensible would have done the same. The alternative was to be rigid at somebody else's expense, which is not righteousness, it is laziness dressed up.

And then, having moved it, she went on measuring.

That is the whole of the story and there is nothing more dramatic in it. She did not move it again. She has never once knowingly moved that line since. She has been scrupulous, in fact, and she would tell you so with total honesty and she would be telling you the truth.

She has simply been measuring everything for eleven years from a mark that was set for one afternoon in a hard case, and she never went back and put it where it belonged, because there was no reason to and nobody ever asks.

She found out at a kitchen table, of all places, hearing herself explain the rule to a niece who had asked her a straight question. And the niece, who is twenty-three and not being clever, said: is that where it is meant to be?

Camille said yes. And then that night she got a piece of paper out.

Now, hear me before you start on yourself, because this is where a serious person turns into her own prosecutor and I am not having it in this room.

Camille has not been cheating. Not once. There is not one moment in eleven years you could point at and call dishonest, and if you laid the whole thing out in front of a fair person they would say she has behaved well, and they would be right.

That is precisely why it survived eleven years.

A moved mark does not need anybody to keep moving it. It only needs everybody to keep measuring.

You have your own version. There is a standard in your life that got adjusted once, for a real reason, in a hard case, and the hard case ended years ago and the adjustment did not, and every measurement you have taken since has been accurate, careful and taken from the wrong place.

Nobody is calling you a fraud. You may be the most scrupulous person you know, and that is exactly the problem, because scrupulous people do not check the mark. They check the measuring.

The command is about the stone in the bag, not the arithmetic

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy that sounds fussy until you notice what it is actually about.

But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have.Deuteronomy 25:15

It is not addressed to swindlers. Read the shape of it: it is addressed to ordinary people who carry a stone in a bag and use it every day, and the point is that the stone itself needs checking, and nobody checks a thing they use constantly. You check what you doubt. You do not check what you lean on.

That is why God has to say it. Not because His people were dishonest, but because a measure in daily use is invisible to the person using it, and the only way it ever gets examined is if somebody with authority tells you to go and look at the stone rather than at the sums.

And hear what is already true over you. You are not under suspicion. That is not my reassurance, it is what the written word says over anybody in Christ, that there is now no condemnation, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman getting a piece of paper out at eleven at night.

And the conscience that flinched when your niece asked is His work in you. The word says He writes His law on the heart, and the Spirit is the one doing that writing, so the fact that a straight question from a twenty-three-year-old could locate an eleven-year drift in one sentence is evidence that the writing is clear and current, not evidence against you.

What is not being asked of you

Now let me be very plain, because this is where a message like this begins issuing instructions about somebody's actual life.

I am not going to tell you where your mark should be. I do not know your situation, I do not know the case that moved it, and I am not going to hand down a standard for a life I have never seen from a message I wrote without meeting you.

I am not going to tell you what to do about the eleven years either. Whether anything needs revisiting is between you and God, and He is entirely able to say so Himself, and He does not need me guessing in His place.

And nobody here is telling you the original adjustment was wrong. It was probably right. Rigidity at somebody else's expense is not faithfulness, and a woman who bends a rule to keep from crushing a person has understood something about God that a great many careful people never do.

So hear what is not required. You are not being asked to go back and re-audit your life. Nothing in Scripture puts a person on that kind of treadmill, and the Spirit of God has never once dealt with a daughter by handing her eleven years of paperwork.

And nothing has been ruined. He restores the years the locusts ate, says the written word, and the Spirit is entirely able to make the twelfth year sound, without demanding a reckoning of the eleven first.