I Am Very Good At Arithmetic

Ben could tell you the number right now.

He has it. He always has it. It runs in the background of his life the way a clock runs, and if you woke him at three in the morning and asked him how many this week, he would have an answer before he had opened both eyes.

Fourteen.

That is a good number. That is a completely defensible number. He has read the guidance, and he knows what the guidance says, and fourteen sits inside it with a small amount of room, and that is not an accident, because Ben is very good at arithmetic.

Here is how the arithmetic works, and it is worth watching, because it is a beautiful piece of engineering.

The two on Friday with the guys after work do not count as two, because he had a big lunch, and everybody knows that changes it. The one poured at his brother-in-law's is a social one, and social ones are a different category entirely. Tuesday he had three, but he had three because it was a bad Tuesday, and a bad Tuesday is an event, and events are not the ordinary run of things, so Tuesday sits in a separate column. The measure he uses at home is his own glass, which he thinks of as a glass, and which is in fact about a glass and a half, and he has known that for four years without ever once letting the thought finish.

Fourteen.

He is not lying to his wife. That is the thing he wants understood. She has never asked, and if she asked, he would say fourteen, and he would not feel that he had lied.

He is thirty-nine and he sat down at his kitchen table on a Saturday morning with a coffee to do something else entirely, and instead he found himself doing the sum, and he watched himself do it, and for the first time in four years he thought about who the sum is for.

Nobody has ever audited me. So who am I keeping books for.

And here is where I stop talking about Ben, because you have your own system, and it is elegant, and you know exactly which categories are load-bearing.

I want to say the first thing gently, because this one embarrasses people more than anything else in this whole subject: there is nothing stupid about you. The system is intelligent. That is the problem. It took real intelligence to build, and it is doing a real job, and the job is not counting.

The truth is a Person, not an audit

Let me put the true thing down first, at the table, before the coffee goes cold.

You are not in trouble for the books. Nobody is coming to audit you, and God is not the auditor you have been quietly preparing for. What He is offering you is not an examination. It is honesty, which is a much kinder thing, and it comes from a direction you may not expect.

Here is what I mean, and it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a kitchen on a Saturday morning:

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.John 8:32

Notice which way round that verse runs, because most people have it backward. It does not say: become free, and then you will be able to face the truth. It says knowing the truth is the thing that does the freeing. The truth is not the price of admission. It is the instrument.

And in the same passage the One speaking makes it plain that He is talking about Himself. So the truth you have been managing at arm's length for four years is not a number and not a report. It is a Person, and He is standing in front of a man at a kitchen table who is very good at arithmetic, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own reasoning, and God's Spirit is the one making it something you can walk toward rather than something you concede. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

What the system is actually protecting

Now let us look at the engineering honestly, because it deserves the compliment and then the truth.

The categories are not there to deceive your wife. She has never asked. They are not there to deceive a doctor. You have not seen one. They are there for one reader, and you are him, and the report is filed daily to an audience of one.

Which means the system's actual job is to keep a particular sentence from finishing in your head. Not to hide a quantity. To interrupt a thought.

And here is what that costs, and it is not what you would guess. It is not your health, at fourteen. It is that a piece of your mind has been permanently assigned to a small, quiet, four-year task of not concluding something. That is real capacity. It used to be free.

Hear this: that capacity belongs to you and it is not owed to a ledger. You have been given a mind to live in the open with, and there is no part of it God has assigned to keeping books nobody reads. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing you can act on rather than a thing you find clever.

And now the serious half, said exactly as carefully as I mean it. If you have been drinking most days, please do not simply stop on your own. Coming off alcohol without medical supervision can be genuinely dangerous, and that is not a reason to carry on, it is the reason to see a doctor this week and say the real number, not the reported one, out loud. Keep every other real help too: the counselor, the meeting, the medicine, the friend. None of it competes with what God is doing in you and none of it is a smaller faith. It is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number.