I Could Not Tell If He Was Honest

He talked for four minutes and you understood about nine words of it.

That is not a complaint about him. He was not unkind and he was not rushing. He used the words he uses every day, in the order he uses them, the way anybody does about their own work.

And at the end of it he said a figure, and then he waited, and you said something like: right, okay, and I will get back to you.

And you have not got back to him, and it is Wednesday.

Now, the thing keeping you from calling is not the figure. You have looked at the figure. The household could find it, with some rearranging, and that is not what is standing in the hall.

What is standing in the hall is that you cannot tell whether it is true.

Not whether he is a crook. That is not what is being thought. Something much more uncomfortable than that: you have no way of checking, none at all, and so any decision here is a decision made on somebody else's word, and that feels like a thing a person should not have to do.

You are a man who cannot verify this and not a man who is being taken advantage of, and being unable to check something has never once meant somebody was lying to you.

Lean not unto thine own understanding

There is a verse everybody has on a wall somewhere, and it is usually read as a warning and it is not one.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5, King James Version)

Lean not unto thine own understanding. That sounds like a rebuke to people who think too highly of themselves, and it can mean that. But sit in a hallway on a Wednesday with no way to check a quote and read it again.

Lean not on it. Do not put your weight there. Because it will not hold, and the verse knows it will not hold, and it says so before anybody has to find out.

You are not required to put your weight on an understanding you do not have, and a man who cannot follow the technical half has never once been asked by God to lean on it. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has not returned a call since Monday, and Proverbs 3:5 says lean not, which is permission and not accusation.

And notice that the verse does not then supply the understanding.

That is the part people expect and it is not there. It does not say lean not unto thine own understanding, for I will explain it to thee. It says trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and that is a different offer entirely.

It offers a place to put the weight. Not an explanation. A place.

You are being offered somewhere to stand rather than something to comprehend, and a decision made without understanding it has never once been a decision made irresponsibly. The written word hands over trust in the first clause and removes the leaning in the second, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a man up who cannot follow the details.

And with all thine heart is worth one sentence, because it changes the temperature.

With all thine heart is not a strenuous instruction. It is the opposite of a divided, anxious, half committed weight. It describes a man who has put the thing down somewhere and walked off, rather than a man gripping it harder.

You are permitted to put this down with your whole heart tonight, and a thing genuinely handed over has never once needed to be checked on before morning. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives a thing a man sets down, and Proverbs 3:5 asks for the whole heart precisely so that no part of it stays in the hallway.

Ask him to say it again

Something practical, and it is one sentence long and it is the whole method.

Call him back and say: would you say that again in different words, as though I know nothing about machines.

That is it. That is the sentence.

You have one sentence available that changes this entire situation, and asking a man to explain it again has never once been an accusation against him. The written word tells a man not to lean on an understanding he lacks and never once tells him to hide the lack, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a plain request possible on a Wednesday.

Three things happen when that sentence is said, and all three are useful.

The first is that most people, asked that, slow down and say it properly, and the second version is nearly always clearer than the first because the first was in shorthand.

The second is that a dishonest person and an honest person respond to that sentence very differently, and the difference is audible without any technical knowledge at all. Honest people get more specific. The other kind get vaguer, or faster, or slightly irritated.

The third is the one that matters most: the asking itself removes the thing that has actually been stopping you, which is not the figure and not the fault. It is having said okay to something that was not understood, and feeling that the saying of okay was a small surrender.

You are able to unsay an okay that was given before you understood it, and one phone call asking for plainer words has never once been too late to make. The Holy Spirit is the one in the hall while a number gets dialed, and Proverbs 3:5 refuses to make a man stand on his own understanding.

And if the second explanation is still not followable, that is information too, and it is not a failure. Some things genuinely cannot be explained in four minutes to somebody who has never taken anything apart. At that point the decision is made on the man rather than on the machine, and deciding on a person is a thing human beings have done since the beginning and it is not naive.