Waiting To Be Certain

Ilan has a condition on it, and the condition is perfectly reasonable, and it has never once been met.

The condition is this: he will open his hand about it the moment he is sure.

That is not stubbornness and it is not evasion. He is a careful man in a careful trade and he has spent his whole life making sure before he moves, and it has served him extremely well, and there are people who are better off today because Ilan did not act on a thing until he was certain about it.

So the condition is not out of character. It is entirely in character. That is precisely the trouble.

He has been waiting to be sure for six years.

And what he noticed, at a table with the lamps on and everybody arguing happily about something else, was not that six years was a long time. It was something more precise. He noticed that he could not describe what being sure would look like.

He tried. He sat there and genuinely tried to construct it: what would have to be true, what he would have to know, what evidence would arrive and from where. And he could not build it. There was no scenario. There was no piece of information he could name that, upon arriving, would produce the feeling he has been waiting for.

Which means he has not been waiting for evidence.

He has been waiting for a feeling, and calling it evidence, and a feeling cannot be scheduled, and that is why six years have gone by without a single thing changing.

Now hear the necessary thing before you use this against yourself.

Ilan is not a coward and he is not procrastinating. Certainty before action is a genuine virtue and he has practiced it well. He is not a man who dithers; he is a man who has correctly applied a good principle to a category of question where that principle does not work, and he has done it consistently, for six years, without noticing the category error.

You have your own version. There is something you would open your hand about the moment you were sure, and if you sat down tonight and tried to describe what sure would look like, you would find the same blank space Ilan found.

Nobody is asking you for it. I want that said early. There is no ask at the end of this article and no plate anywhere on this site.

Paul does the arithmetic in a tense people miss

There is a sentence in Philippians that gets read as extravagant devotion and is actually a piece of accounting, done in the present tense.

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.Philippians 3:8

I count. Present tense, first person, ongoing. Not I felt and not I concluded once, years ago, and have been coasting on it since.

It is a reckoning he performs, and the verb is the same family of word a merchant would use over a ledger. He is not describing an emotional state. He is describing a valuation, and a valuation is something a person does rather than something that happens to them.

That is the distinction Ilan was missing at his own table.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not required to feel certain in order to act rightly. That is not my permission: the written word puts this in the language of reckoning rather than of feeling, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man sitting at a table with the lamps on.

And you already have the knowledge the reckoning is based on. Paul does not weigh things against a feeling; he weighs them against the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, and the word says that this is given, that we have received the Spirit which is of God so that we might know the things freely given to us, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that knowing rather than leaving a man to manufacture it.

Nobody is asking you for anything

Now I am going to be extremely plain, because this is the exact place where a message of this kind becomes a request, and this site would rather not exist than do that.

Nobody here wants your thing. Nothing is being asked of you at the end of this article. Nothing here is gated, nothing is held back behind a payment, and nobody is going to imply that opening a hand is what makes a person eligible to receive from God. If you ever meet a page that does that, close it and do not return, and that applies to this one exactly as much as to any other.

There is no plate. There has never been one on this site and there will not be.

And I am not telling you to act while unsure about something serious. That would be a foolish thing to say to a stranger about a situation I know nothing about, and it would be the opposite of what Paul is describing anyway.

What I am saying is narrower: check what kind of thing you are waiting for. If it is information, name it, because information can be sought and can arrive. If it is a feeling, name that too, because it can then stop pretending to be a condition, and a man can decide what he is going to do without waiting for weather.

And nothing about your standing has been suspended for six years. The word says there is now no condemnation for those in Christ, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this has been settled the whole time, which means the waiting has not put you in any kind of holding pattern with God.

What the grip is actually round

The exercise worth an evening is not should I let go. It is one question, written down, in your own hand.

What would sure look like?

Write the answer. If it is a fact, write the fact and where it would come from. If nothing comes, write that nothing comes, because that is the most useful sentence you will write this year.

Because a condition that cannot be described is not a condition. It is a permanent state wearing the clothes of a temporary one, and it will go on wearing them for another six years unless somebody asks it for its papers.

And you are able to reckon rather than wait. Not once you feel decisive: the word puts the counting in the present tense in the mouth of a man in prison, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real faculty in an ordinary person rather than an apostolic specialism.