I Will Not Call The Repair Man

There is something broken in that house and it has been broken a long time.

The furnace that only half works. The faucet that has been dripping since spring. The outlet you stopped using. The window that does not shut properly and has been letting cold in for two winters.

And you know exactly what to do about it, which is to call somebody. The number is not hard to find. It is not the money, or it is not only the money.

It is that a man would come, and he would have to get to it, and to get to it he would walk through this house.

So it stays broken. And it has been staying broken for so long now that the broken thing has become normal, and the normal thing is that you live somewhere slightly colder and slightly worse than you would otherwise, and pay for that every single day in small amounts.

I want to say something clearly at the start. A house in that state is a record of what a hard stretch cost, and it is not a verdict on the man living in it. And this is not silliness. Nobody would find it silly if they understood it. The thought of a stranger walking down your hall is a real thought and it has real weight and I am not going to talk you out of the weight of it.

I want to make the walk shorter instead.

A prudent man foreseeth the evil

There is a line in Proverbs that is about looking ahead and getting out of the way.

A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished. (Proverbs 27:12, King James Version)

Now the interesting word in that verse, for our purposes, is hideth.

That is not a criticism. In that proverb, hiding is the wise action. The prudent man sees something coming and takes cover, and the text approves of it entirely.

So the instinct to protect yourself is not the problem. Scripture has a category for it and the category is wisdom.

The trouble is what happens when the hiding outlasts the danger, or when the hiding costs more than the thing it was protecting against. That is not addressed in the verse, and it is exactly where you are. A protective instinct that was correct has kept running past the point where it was doing you any good, which is a thing protective instincts do in every human being who has ever lived.

You are not being unreasonable, and Proverbs 27:12 has never once treated the instinct to take cover as a weakness. It is written that the prudent man foresees and hides, which puts self protection on the side of wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell a person when a wise thing has run past its usefulness without shaming them for having done it.

You have been paying for cover in a currency that has quietly got expensive. The word approves the hiding and never once discusses what it costs to keep hiding, and the Spirit of God is the one who counts what a protection is charging.

The man walks a route, not a house

Now here is the practical thing, and it is the reason I brought you here.

When a repair man comes to a house he does not look at the house. He looks at the thing. He walks a route, he kneels down, he does the job, he walks back out.

I have watched a hundred of them do it. He is thinking about the part he does not have in the van. He is thinking about the next job. He is not conducting an inspection and he could not tell you, an hour later, what was on your stairs.

So the visit is not a house visit. The visit is a corridor and a small area around a broken object.

And a corridor is a fifteen minute job.

You were never facing an inspection, and there has never once been a version of that visit where the whole house was being looked at. Proverbs 27:12 puts prudence in the seeing ahead rather than in the never opening, and the Spirit of God is the one who resizes a thing that has been picture sized for years.

So tonight is the corridor. And nothing else, and no phone call.

You are permitted to clear a route without deciding anything about calling anybody, and clearing it has never once obligated you to pick up a phone. It is written that the prudent man sees what is coming, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in fifteen minutes of preparation for a thing that may never happen.

Clear the route to the first chair

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Start at your front door. Walk to the first chair somebody could sit in. That is your corridor.

Move only what is actually on that path. Not near it. On it.

Fifteen minutes, then stop, whether it is finished or not.

You are preparing a corridor tonight and not a house, and no repair man in the history of this trade has ever once inspected the rooms he did not walk through. Proverbs 27:12 honors a man who sees ahead and takes cover, and the Spirit of God is the one who resizes a thing that has been picture sized for two winters.

Make no call. Make no decision about making a call. Tonight is a strip of floor and nothing else.

You are able to prepare one route tonight, and preparing it has never once committed you to using it. Proverbs 27:12 honors seeing ahead, and the Spirit of God is present in a cleared hallway in a house with a broken window in it.