It Is Not The Thing It Is The Not Knowing

She lent a drill on a Tuesday and thought about it on and off for nine days.

Not with anxiety exactly. She would like to be precise about this because precision is the only thing that has ever helped her.

She did not worry that it was damaged. She did not think about the money. If it had been dropped down a stairwell and destroyed on the Tuesday afternoon and he had rung to say so, she would have said honestly, genuinely, without effort: do not worry about it at all.

What she could not put down was that she did not know where it was.

There is a drill, and it exists, and it is somewhere, and she cannot picture the room it is in. And every so often across nine days, while doing something else, a small process would start up in the back of her head and run for a second and produce nothing, because there is nothing to produce, and then stop, and then start again four hours later.

Nine days of that.

He brought it back on the Thursday of the second week and it was fine and it had been fine the whole time.

And she stood in the hall afterwards and thought: I have been calling that attachment for about fifteen years.

It is not attachment. She would have given him the drill. She has given away better things than that without a second thought.

It is the gap. It is the open loop, and she cannot close a loop she has no information about, and lending opens one every single time.

Be content with such things as ye have

Sit down in the armchair a minute, because there is a sentence in Hebrews about contentment, and the reason it gives is not the reason anybody expects.

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

Be content with such things as ye have. And then: for.

Everything hangs on that for, because it is about to tell you what the contentment is fastened to, and it is not an inventory and it is not a technique and it is not a temperament.

I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.

The contentment is fastened to a presence. To somebody who does not go and does not stop being there, and the sentence is quoted in the perfect tense of somebody who has already spoken it.

Hear this in your own hall. You are not an anxious woman failing at trust, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture fastens contentment to a presence that does not leave rather than to a nervous system that stops running processes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been with you through every one of those nine days.

Now let me name what the loop actually is, because you have been calling it the wrong thing for fifteen years and the wrong name has cost you.

It is not greed. It is not attachment. You would have handed him the drill outright, and you know that about yourself, and you have proved it repeatedly. The written word never called that greed, and the Spirit of God has been with you through every one of those handovers.

It is unresolved information.

Your head runs a background process on anything unresolved, and it does this without your permission, and it has done it since you were a child, and it costs you something every time it fires. Most people's version of this is quieter. Yours is not, and that is a fact about you rather than a verdict on you.

Hear this too, and let it settle where you stood. You are not being asked to become somebody whose head runs quieter, and Scripture is what says so. What is written fastens contentment to the one who said I will never leave thee, and the Spirit of God has never once required a woman to close a loop before she could be at peace inside it.

And now the thing about the loop that is worth having, because there is one and you have not looked at it.

There is exactly one loop in your life that never closes and never needs to, and it is the one the verse names. He is with you and you cannot verify it by checking, and there is no report and no location and no photograph, and it is nevertheless the most settled fact you have. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has made it settled in you.

You already hold one open loop and rest in it, exactly as it is written, and the Holy Spirit has had you resting in it for years.

The drill was never a different kind of thing. It was just a smaller one, and nobody had ever pointed at the two of them together.