I Read What It Probably Is

Dale found the answer on a Tuesday night in July, and I want to be fair to him about how he found it, because he did not do anything careless.

He typed in the make of the car, and the year, and a description of the light, and he read for about forty minutes. He read a forum thread. He read the comments under a video. He read a page that had clearly been written by somebody who knew a great deal.

And at the end of forty minutes he had a conclusion, and the conclusion had a name, and it was a name he could say out loud. It was not a serious one. It was the kind of thing that costs a bit and is not urgent.

He shut the laptop and felt better than he had all week.

Here is what has happened since.

He has told his wife the name of it. He has told a man at work the name of it. When his brother asked in August, he gave the name, and his brother said, "Oh, that's not too bad," and Dale agreed, and the conversation moved on.

And the light has been on for nine weeks and nobody has looked at that car.

Now, I have been sitting with people a long time and I know exactly what happened on that Tuesday night, because it happens in the corridors of a hospital constantly and I have watched it more times than I could count. Forty minutes of reading did not produce knowledge. It produced relief. And relief is so close to knowledge in the body that a person cannot always tell them apart from the inside.

The chest goes down. The shoulders drop. The situation feels handled. And nothing whatsoever has changed about the car.

That is not stupidity, and I would fight anybody who called it that. That is a tired man who needed the thing to be smaller, and who found a way to make it smaller that cost him nothing but forty minutes.

The trouble is that a guess is rented, not owned. It has to be paid for every week, in the small tax of maintaining it, and it can be repossessed at any moment by a noise on the highway.

His wife said something in the last week of August, mildly, not pushing. She said, "Do we actually know that's what it is?"

And Dale said, "That's what it looks like."

And she said, "Right," and left it, and he sat with that word for a while.

Relief and knowledge feel almost the same

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

I am not going to tell you what your light is. I have not seen the car and I am not going to be the second stranger who hands a man a name he can repeat at work. And I am not going to tell you the thing you read is wrong. It might be exactly right. That is not the point and it was never the point.

What I want to talk about is the difference between a thing being probably true and a thing being known.

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.Proverbs 18:13

Now, that word folly lands hard in English, and I want to take the sting out of it, because Proverbs is not calling anybody a fool for wanting to know.

The picture in that verse is a courtroom or a doorway. Somebody comes with a matter. And before the whole thing has been laid out, before the second half is even spoken, an answer gets given. The answer might even be a good one. The problem is that it was produced before the hearing, and so it is not connected to the matter. It is connected to the answerer.

That is the whole diagnosis in nine words, and it is not about intelligence. It is about sequence.

You are not a fool for reaching for an answer, and Proverbs is describing an order of operations rather than handing out a verdict on a man. It is written that answering before hearing is folly, which locates the fault in the sequence and not in the person, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a correction you can receive without flinching.

You have wanted to know the truth about your own car the whole time, and Scripture treats that wanting as the good thing that it is. Proverbs says the heart of the prudent gets knowledge and the ear of the wise seeks it, which puts the seeking on the same side as wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a want into a phone call.

The cost of a rented conclusion

Here is the part I most want to hand you, and it is about what the guess has been costing.

A known thing sits still. You put it down and it stays put. You can build on top of it. You can plan around it. It does not need anything from you.

A guess needs constant small maintenance. Every time somebody asks, it has to be produced again. Every time the car makes a sound, it has to be checked against. Every time it has been up for a few weeks, some part of a man quietly re-runs the forum thread in his head to see if it still holds.

And under all of it there is a thin, permanent thread of unless.

That thread is the expensive part. It does not stop a man sleeping. It is far too small for that. It just sits there, nine weeks long, and takes a little.

You have been carrying a thin permanent unless since July, and the written word never once asks anybody to live under one. Isaiah says His people shall dwell in quiet resting places, which is a description of what settled ground actually feels like, and the Spirit of God is what makes that available to a man about a car and not only about the large things.

And I will say the hard half plainly, because a man deserves that from anybody who claims to care about him.

A guess made on a screen has no way of being wrong out loud. It cannot fail a test, because no test has been run. And that is comfortable right up until the moment a machine disagrees with it somewhere inconvenient. If that car ever does anything on the road that worries you, none of this applies, and it goes to somebody qualified that day. No message is worth a mile that should not have been driven.

You were never intended to be the last word on your own engine, and God did not build His people to work that way. It is written that in the multitude of counselors there is safety, which puts other people's competence in the design rather than at the end of a rope, and His Spirit is what makes handing it on a relief instead of a defeat.