Nine Days And Still Two Options

Nine days.

And in nine days there have been perhaps forty separate occasions on which this has been thought about properly, with attention, for several minutes at a time.

Forty rounds. And the two options are exactly where they were on the first evening.

That is the fact that should be sitting at the top of this page, because everything else follows from it. Nothing has moved. No new information has arrived. The two sides have been examined from every angle available and neither side has improved or worsened by a single degree.

So the deciding is not being delayed by a lack of information, and that is worth stating plainly because the delay has been explaining itself as though it were.

And here is the thing about nine days that nobody says out loud.

Not deciding is not free. Nine days of an unresolved thing in a house is a cost. It has been paid in attention, in the low hum in the background of every other job, in the conversations that got half of a person rather than all of one. That is real and it has already been spent.

You are a woman who has not decided yet and not a woman who cannot decide, and nine days of holding two options has never once been evidence that you lack the capacity to close one.

Choose you this day

There is a famous sentence in Joshua and everybody remembers the second half of it, and the first half is where the instruction actually is.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve. (Joshua 24:15, King James Version)

Choose you this day.

This day. Not eventually, not when it becomes clearer, not once the matter has been fully weighed. He is standing in front of a whole nation and he attaches a day to the choosing, and the day he attaches is the one they are standing in.

You are able to attach a day to this and the day is the one you are standing in, and a choice put off until it became obvious has never once become obvious by being put off. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has been at the same table for nine evenings, and Joshua 24:15 says this day and makes the timing part of the instruction.

Now notice what he does not do, because it is the part that lifts the weight.

He does not tell them which. He lays two things out and he tells them to choose, and then he says what he himself is doing, and that is the end of his involvement in their deciding.

He does not persuade. He does not warn them about the consequences of picking wrong. He gives them a day and leaves them with it.

You are being handed a decision rather than a verdict, and a choice laid out by God has never once come with a trap hidden in one of the two options. The written word gives the nation a day and withholds the answer on purpose, and the Spirit of God is the one who leaves a woman genuinely free at her own kitchen table.

And there is a third thing there, and it is the one that has been quietly missing for nine days.

He says: as for me and my house. He does not just decide. He says it out loud, in front of everybody, in a sentence anybody could repeat.

A decision that is spoken is a different object from a decision that is held. The held one can be reopened in the dark at no cost. The spoken one has a witness, and the witness is most of what makes it stay decided.

You have been holding something that was always meant to be said, and a choice kept inside a woman's head has never once had the weight of one said out loud. The Holy Spirit is the one in the room when a sentence gets spoken, and Joshua 24:15 ends with a man announcing his household's choice rather than concluding it privately.

What the ninth day actually costs

Something practical, and it is a small piece of arithmetic worth doing once.

Consider what has happened on each of the nine days. On day one there were two options and the facts. On day nine there are two options and the facts.

The facts did not grow. What grew was the weight of the question, because a question left open in a house gets heavier by simply being open, and that is a property of open questions and not a fault in the woman holding it.

You are carrying a weight that came from the duration and not from the difficulty, and a question that has been open nine days has never once been nine times harder than it was on the first evening. The written word attaches a day to the choosing precisely so the weight does not accumulate, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends an accumulation at a kitchen table.

And here is the other half, which is more encouraging than it sounds.

Nine days of turning something over has produced something, even though it has not produced a decision. It has produced certainty that there is no right answer available. That is genuine knowledge and it was earned.

So the nine days were not wasted. They answered a question. The question they answered is: can this be resolved by more thinking. And the answer is no, and that answer is the permission to stop.

You have been given a real answer by these nine days and it is simply not the answer you were looking for, and nine evenings of careful attention have never once been nine evenings thrown away. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman accept the answer she actually got, and Joshua 24:15 says choose you this day rather than choose when it is clear.

Then write it down and put it where somebody will see it. That is the announcing, in the smallest form it comes in.