A Second Person Slows It Down

He has run the numbers, because that is what he does, and the numbers are not in dispute.

Alone: forty minutes. He knows where everything is in the van. He does not have to explain the sequence, or wait while somebody looks for the right size, or answer a reasonable question about why he does it that way when the other way is quicker, which it is not, and which takes four minutes to explain properly.

With somebody: ninety. Sometimes two hours if it is somebody new.

He has taken people. He is not a hermit and this is not a character study of a difficult man. He took a lad from the church for about eight months two years ago and it was fine, and the lad moved, and he has not replaced him and has never really thought about why not.

So it is six years of mostly alone, and about eleven jobs a month, and the arithmetic is completely correct.

Here is the thing that started in the spring and which he has not been able to file.

He finishes a job in forty minutes and then he sits in the van for a bit before he drives off.

Not long. Four or five minutes. He does something on his phone or he does not do anything, and then he starts the engine.

He has begun to notice that he does this after almost every job, and that four or five minutes is a fair proportion of the time he saved, and that he could not tell you what those minutes are for.

His wife asked him in June whether he was all right and he said yes, and he was, and he is.

Seventy people, thirty five destinations, and He did that on purpose

Sit in the van a minute, because there is a verse with numbers in it, and if you do the arithmetic the way you would do any other arithmetic you will get an answer that ought to bother a man who thinks like you.

After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before His face into every city and place, whither He Himself would come.Luke 10:1

Seventy. Sent two and two.

That is thirty five destinations. He had seventy people available and He chose to reach thirty five places instead of seventy.

He halved the coverage. Deliberately, in a situation with genuine urgency, with a finite number of people and a great deal of ground, and He is the one who set it up that way.

Hear this with the engine off. You are not being asked to ignore the numbers, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the Lord Himself halving His own reach on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who went with each of those thirty five pairs, so the second person was never a concession to somebody who could not manage alone.

Now let me be exact, because you are exact and a loose argument would insult you.

Your arithmetic is right. Forty and ninety are the real figures and nobody here is going to pretend that two people do a one person job faster. They do not.

The question is what you are optimizing for, and you have never chosen the target. Nothing written in Scripture set it and the Holy Spirit did not hand it to you. It was inherited. Minutes per job is the metric because minutes per job is measurable, and measurable metrics quietly become the goal in every system that does not deliberately choose otherwise, and you know that better than most people because you have watched it wreck three organizations you worked for.

You have run yourself the way those places ran, for six years, and you would have spotted it in a fortnight in anybody else's business.

Hear this too, and let it settle where the four or five minutes live. You are not inefficient for taking somebody, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has the Lord accepting half the coverage as the price of the pairing, and the Spirit of God has never once measured a man's obedience in minutes per job.

And now the four or five minutes, because that is the real finding here and you noticed it yourself.

You save fifty minutes and you spend five of them sitting in a van unable to say what for.

I will tell you what for. A job has a weight, and the weight does not evaporate when the work stops. Somebody carries it out of the house. If there is a second person, it goes into the conversation on the drive. If there is not, it sits in the van with you for four or five minutes until it settles enough for you to start the engine.

That is not a mood. That is the arithmetic you have not been doing, and it is the arithmetic the written word did when it sent them in twos, with the Holy Spirit going with the pair.