Nine Years and No Wage

You do the books on a Sunday evening, and you have done them on a Sunday evening for nine years, and nobody in your house knows exactly what is in them.

It works. That is the strange and difficult thing. The business is not failing. There are four people who depend on it and they have all been paid, on time, every month, for nine years, including the two bad winters when you did that by not paying yourself.

You take what is left. Some months that is reasonable. Some months it is not a wage in any sense that a person outside would recognize.

Nine years.

You stopped saying how it was really going about four years in. People ask how the business is and you say it is ticking along, and that is not a lie, and it is not an answer either.

Your wife knows more than she says. She has said one or two things over the years that told you she had been reading the shape of it from the outside, and she has never once pushed, and you are not sure whether that is a kindness or something you have quietly required of her.

And there is a sentence that arrives on Sunday evenings now, somewhere between the invoices and the closing of the laptop: a man who has done this for nine years and cannot pay himself has been failing slowly and calling it holding on.

The psalm puts expectation somewhere specific

There is a passage in Psalm 62 where David repeats himself deliberately.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved. In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:5-8

He says only three times in four verses. He is not being lazy with vocabulary. He is fencing something off.

And look at where he puts expectation. Not in a result, not in a plan, not in a set of figures. My expectation is from him. The whole weight of what he is anticipating is relocated onto a person rather than onto an outcome.

Then he says something that a man doing books on a Sunday needs: pour out your heart before him. Not tidy it first. Pour it out.

You are allowed to bring the actual figures and the actual nine years without arranging them first. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says pour out your heart before Him, Psalm 62:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man past the tidying long enough to say it plainly.

Nothing on this page is business advice

I am not going to say one word about the business.

I do not know your trade, your margins, your four people, or the two bad winters. Anybody offering strategy to a man in year nine from the outside is offering an insult with a suggestion attached.

And nothing here reads nine tight years as a report on your competence. Scripture never reads a hard stretch that way, Ecclesiastes 9:11, and the Holy Spirit is not the voice on a Sunday evening saying you should have been sharper.

You have not been overlooked in these nine years. That is settled and it did not become true because you needed it tonight.

What the sentence gets wrong

Let us look at it properly.

A man who cannot pay himself has been failing slowly and calling it holding on.

There is one fact in that sentence and the rest is interpretation.

The fact is that you have not taken a proper wage. The interpretation is that this constitutes failure, and Scripture never wrote that interpretation, Psalm 62:6, and the Holy Spirit is not the one supplying it on a Sunday.

But four people have been paid every month for nine years. That is not a by-product. That is the actual outcome of a nine-year decision, made again every month, by a man who took the shortfall himself rather than passing it on.

There is a word for that and it is not failure.

You are not a man who has been failing slowly. Scripture says the laborer is worthy of his hire, 1 Timothy 5:18, and that includes you, and the Holy Spirit does not read a man's worth off what was left at the end of a month.

The thing you have quietly required

And the harder one, and I say it gently.

Your wife has not pushed. You have taken that as consideration, and it may be. It may also be something you have arranged, over nine years, by going slightly quiet whenever it came close, until she learned not to come close.

That is not a crime. It is what a man does when he is carrying something and does not want to hand any of it over. Scripture does not scold him for it, Psalm 62:8, and the Holy Spirit has not been counting it against you.

But nine years is a long time to be the only person in a marriage who knows what is in the books, and it costs both of you, and it costs her in a way you cannot see from where you are sitting.

You have not been asked to carry this alone in your own house. Scripture says two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to keep a marriage informed only about the good months.