The One I Got Wrong Before

You have not said out loud what this is really about.

Not to your daughter, who has been very helpful and has opinions. Not to the man who came and looked at it. And not properly to yourself either, although it has been sitting there quite plainly for about a week.

It is the other one.

The decision some years ago, the expensive one, the one that turned out badly and that everybody was kind about afterward, which was somehow worse than if they had not been.

And ever since then there has been a change in how decisions get made in this house, and it happened quietly and nobody ever named it.

You check. Everything gets run past somebody. Not because their judgment is better, and you know it is not, and in some cases it is considerably worse. It gets run past them because if it goes wrong then at least you were not the only one who thought it was a good idea.

That is what one bad decision bought, and it has been running for years, and the cost of it has been much larger than the cost of the thing that went wrong.

You are a woman whose judgment is intact and not a woman who cannot be trusted with this, and one decision that went badly has never once been a description of the mind that made it.

Remember ye not the former things

There is an instruction in Isaiah that sounds impossible until it is read carefully.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. (Isaiah 43:18, King James Version)

Remember ye not. That cannot mean erase the memory, because nobody can do that on command and God does not give impossible instructions as a test.

What it means is closer to: do not stand there. Do not make that the place you are living. Do not consult it as though it were the authority on what is happening now.

You are permitted to stop consulting a memory as though it were a report on today, and a thing that happened years ago has never once been the correct authority on what your judgment is worth now. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has been standing somewhere for years, and Isaiah 43:18 tells a people where not to stand rather than what to forget.

And notice who it was said to.

It was said to people who had a genuine history of getting things wrong. This is not addressed to an innocent nation with nothing behind it. Their former things were real and some of them were their own fault, and God says: not there, do not stand there.

You are being told the same thing that was told to people with a worse record than yours, and a real failure in the past has never once disqualified anybody from being told to stop looking at it. The written word gives that instruction to people with an actual history rather than to people without one, and the Spirit of God is the one who says it into a kitchen on a Tuesday.

And there is one more thing in the wording. Neither consider the things of old.

Consider is the interesting word. It means to weigh, to take into account, to use as a factor. God is not telling them to lose the information. He is telling them to stop using it as an input.

You are able to hold a memory without weighing every new decision against it, and a thing kept in the mind has never once been required to sit on the scale as well. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes something off a scale in a woman's kitchen, and Isaiah 43:18 separates remembering from considering.

What the checking actually costs

Something practical, and it is an honest look at the arrangement that has grown up.

Running it past somebody does not improve the decision. It has not, in any of the years since, made a single decision better. What it does is distribute the responsibility, so that a bad outcome has more than one name on it.

That is not advice seeking. It is insurance.

You have been buying insurance rather than wisdom, and a decision run past somebody for company has never once come back a better decision than it went out. The written word tells a people to stop weighing the old thing, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman what a habit is actually for.

And the cost of that insurance has been high, and here is what it has taken.

It has cost the pleasure of deciding. There used to be something in this house that was yours, which was looking at a situation and knowing what to do about it, and that has been handed away one small decision at a time.

It has also cost your daughter something, although she would never say so, because a mother who checks everything has quietly become a mother who is treated as somebody who needs checking on.

You are able to take something back tonight that has been handed away in small pieces, and a woman deciding for her own household has never once been a woman being difficult about it. The Holy Spirit is the one who walks a woman out of it, and Isaiah 43:18 tells people to stop standing in the old place.

So this one gets decided alone. Not to prove anything. Because it is a small decision about a machine, and it is exactly the right size to be the first one.