Eleven Months Of Deciding

Loretta has been going to decide about that car since last October.

She would put it exactly that way, and she has, to several people. I'm going to have to make a decision about the car. She said it at Thanksgiving. She said it in February when the heater went. She said it in June to her neighbor over the fence.

Eleven months.

Now, here is what makes this different from a woman who is dragging her feet, and it matters, because dragging your feet is a thing people get told off for and this is not that.

Loretta has genuinely been thinking about it. She is not avoiding the subject. She thinks about that car more than almost anything else in her week. She has looked at what other cars cost. She knows roughly what hers is worth, because she asked the mechanic in March and he told her straight. She has had two entire conversations with her son about it that both of them found useful.

She has done the work of deciding. What she has not done is decide.

And there is a specific reason for that, and it is not weakness. It is that a decision requires a moment, and she has been waiting for the right moment to arrive on its own, and it does not work that way and nobody ever tells you.

A decision is not something that happens to a person when the conditions are right. It is a thing somebody does, at a particular hour, usually while feeling more or less the same as they felt the hour before.

So she waits to feel decided, and feeling decided is downstream of deciding, and the whole thing has been stuck in that loop since October.

Meanwhile the car has needed three things in eleven months, all of which got paid for, because when a repair is in front of you, you pay it, and the decision goes back on the shelf for later.

Her son said in the summer, "Mom, at some point not choosing is choosing."

And Loretta said, "I know."

And she does know. And she said the same sentence about the car nine days later.

Not deciding has been an answer all along

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you which way to go on that car. That is yours, and it depends on numbers I do not have and a life I have not lived.

And I am not going to scold you about eleven months. A woman who has thought about a thing constantly for eleven months is not a woman who has been ignoring it.

You have been given a sound mind for exactly this, and Scripture names it among the things already handed over. 2 Timothy 1 says God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, which puts the clear head on the list of what was given rather than what must be produced, and the Spirit of God is what makes eleven months of thinking finishable at a kitchen table.

What I want to look at is the difference between thinking and deciding, and then at a verse where a man puts a date on it.

Choose you this day whom ye will serve.Joshua 24:15

Now, Joshua is an old man giving a last speech, and the whole chapter is him laying out the history and the options and the consequences.

And when it comes to the decision, he does something specific with the timing.

This day.

Not: consider these things. Not: come to a settled view over the coming season. Not: let me know once it has been weighed.

This day. He puts a date on it, and the date is today, and he does that at the end of a long and fair presentation of both sides, because he understood something about people that has not changed in three thousand years.

A choice without a date attached does not get made. It gets thought about, indefinitely, by sincere people, forever.

You are not somebody who cannot decide, and Scripture puts a date on the choosing rather than waiting for anybody to feel ready. It is written choose you this day whom ye will serve, which attaches a specific time to the deciding, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a practical mercy rather than a demand.

You have done all the work of deciding except the part that has an hour on it. Joshua 24 puts the weighing before the day and the choosing on it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that division something a woman can actually use.

Put it in pen and tell somebody

Here is the practical thing, and it is a date rather than a decision.

Do not decide about the car tonight. That is not what is being asked and it would not work anyway.

Set a date for deciding.

Get the calendar, pick a day, write it in pen, and put four words on it: decide about the car.

Two weeks out is good. Far enough that nothing has to happen tonight. Close enough that it will actually arrive.

And then, and this is the part that makes it work rather than being another intention, tell one person the date.

Your son. Your neighbor. Anybody who will remember and who is not going to nag.

Because a date in a private calendar is a thing that can be moved, silently, by the person who set it, and a date somebody else knows about is a different kind of object.

You have permission to decide on a day of your own choosing, and no verse anywhere requires a person to feel ready before the hour arrives. Joshua 24 puts the day in front of the people and does not ask them how they feel about it, and the Spirit of God is what makes a date written in pen an act of faith rather than of pressure.

And I want to say the thing your son said, gently, because he was right and it lands hard.

Not choosing is choosing. Eleven months of not deciding has been a decision to keep the car, made three times, each time in a repair shop with a bill in front of her, under the worst possible conditions for making it.

That is the actual cost of the drift. Not that nothing has been decided. That everything has been decided, badly, at the counter, by default, three separate times.

You were never failing to decide, and Scripture treats a settled choice as a thing a person makes rather than a thing that arrives. Joshua 24 has the people answering out loud on the day, and His Spirit is what makes an ordinary Tuesday two weeks from now as valid a day as any.