I Have Been Meaning To Get To It

Walt has said the sentence eleven times. He has not counted, but I have, because I know the sentence.

"I've been meaning to get to it."

He said it to his wife in March. He said it to his son in April, twice. He said it to a fellow at the feed store in the summer who noticed the light through the windshield and mentioned it in a friendly way. He said it to himself, out loud, in the driveway, in the middle of August, which is when a sentence has really got its feet under it.

And here is the thing about Walt that matters. Every single time he said it, he meant it.

That is not a man making excuses. I want to be plain about that, because the world has a way of treating a delay as a character flaw, and it usually is not one. Walt got a barn roof through a winter with two panels and a prayer. He sat up three nights with a sick heifer in February. He drove ninety miles on a Sunday because his daughter's washing machine flooded a kitchen. This is a man who does things.

He also has not looked at a light on his dashboard since the last week of February.

Now, I have been on the road a long time and I have watched this exact thing in a hundred good people, and I will tell you what I think happens, and it is not laziness.

The first time you say I'll get to it, it is a plan. There is a real intention in it and a rough date attached.

The second time, it is still a plan, but the date has come off it.

By the fifth or sixth time, something has changed that nobody notices. The sentence is not a plan any more. It has become a way of putting the thing down. It works. It ends the conversation, it settles the feeling, and it lets a man drive to town. And a sentence that does that job well gets used again, because that is how people are built.

So by August, the saying of it has replaced the doing of it, and neither Walt nor anybody who loves him can tell the difference from the outside.

His son said something in April that stuck in him like a burr. He did not mean anything by it. He said, "Dad, you've been meaning to for a while now."

Walt said, "I have."

And then he went in and ate his supper and did not sleep especially well.

The man who watches the wind

Let me say what I am not going to do, so you can settle.

I am not going to guess what your light is. I have not looked at your engine and I am not going to be a voice on the internet telling a man his own truck is fine. I do not know. And I am not going to talk to you like a man who has been sitting in a chair since February, because that is not what happened. I know what your year has looked like.

What I want to put in front of you is one line from the old preacher.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.Ecclesiastes 11:4

Now, that is a farming line and it is meant to be. And it is not about laziness at all, which is why so many people read past it.

The man in that verse is not idle. He is out in the field. He is up early. He is watching the sky like a careful man should, because sowing in the wrong weather is a real way to lose a season. Every single thing about him is responsible.

He just never sows.

That is the whole point of the proverb. The waiting is not the opposite of the work. The waiting is dressed up as the work, and it looks exactly like diligence from any distance at all, and at the end of it the field is bare.

You are not a man who does not act, and February to September is a groove rather than a character. It is written that the one who watches the wind never sows, which is Ecclesiastes describing a careful man rather than an idle one, and His Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land as relief instead of another accusation.

You have been waiting for a version of this week that was never coming, and Scripture puts that waiting in a farmer's clothes so nobody could mistake it for rest. The passage names the clouds and the wind, which are real conditions and not imagined ones, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an old agricultural line into a sentence about a dashboard in September.

Intending and doing are two different animals

Here is the difference, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

An intention lives in the future and costs nothing today. That is not a criticism. It is just what an intention is. You can hold four hundred of them at once and never break a sweat.

A doing lives in a Tuesday and costs about eleven minutes.

The trouble is that an intention feels like a doing. Saying "I'll get to it" produces almost the same settling in a man's chest as actually getting to it. That is a real thing and it is why the sentence is so hard to shake. It pays out.

And the longer it pays out, the more expensive the actual doing gets, because now the doing has to carry the weight of all the months of saying. Going to the shop in March would have been an errand. Going in September feels like a confession.

You have not been accumulating a debt, and there is nothing in the written word that makes an old delay cost more than a new one. The passage in Ecclesiastes goes straight on to say sow your seed in the morning and in the evening withhold not your hand, which puts the next opportunity right there and never once mentions the missed ones, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a doorway rather than a scolding.

I will say the hard half too, because I would not respect you if I did not.

There is a point where meaning to stops being harmless. Not morally. Practically. A machine does not care about a man's intentions, and it does not grade him on how sincerely he planned to look. If something on that truck is a safety matter, then the kindest and most honest thing I can say to you is that it goes to somebody qualified now and not after the harvest, and no message of mine is worth a mile you should not have driven.

You were never asked to be finished, and the word only ever asks a man for the morning in front of him. Ecclesiastes tells the farmer to sow in the morning and again in the evening without knowing which will prosper, which is a whole theology of doing the next thing, and His Spirit is what makes the next thing possible tonight rather than in principle.