I Say We And It Is Only Me

You said we again on the phone this morning, and there is no we.

We can get that done by Thursday. We will have a look at it. I will check with the team, which is a sentence you said out loud, and the team is you in a van.

And you are not lying, exactly. You are doing something else, and you know what it is. One man sounds small. One man sounds like a risk. We sounds like there is a building somewhere with a light on in it and somebody else to ring if you are ill.

So you have been saying it for three years, and you have never once enjoyed saying it, and that is the part worth looking at.

I am not going to tell you that people love a one man band. Some do and some do not and I cannot run your phone calls. I am going to talk about accuracy, because a strange thing happens when a man disappears out of his own sentences.

A just weight, and what God thinks of it

There is a verse in Proverbs about scales, and it is not only about cheating people.

A false balance in that world was a weight that said one thing and did another. And the verse does not stop at calling it wrong. It says something about how God feels when the measure is true.

A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight. (Proverbs 11:1, King James Version)

You are allowed to be measured accurately, and accuracy has never once been the same as being small. Proverbs 11:1 calls a true weight God's delight rather than merely His requirement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a verse about market scales to a man standing at a trestle table with a phone in his hand.

Read the second half again, because everybody reads the first half. A just weight is his delight. Not his minimum standard. Not the least He will tolerate. His delight.

Which means accuracy about your own size is not a humiliation you are being asked to accept. It is the thing God is actually pleased by, and He is pleased by it in both directions.

You have a true measure and God takes pleasure in it, and it has never once needed to be bigger to please Him. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an old line about weights reach a man who has been inflating his own pronouns, and Proverbs 11:1 puts delight on the accurate measure rather than on the impressive one.

The we is not pride, it is hiding

Let me say what I think the we is, because most people would call it bragging and I do not think it is.

It is a screen. A man standing behind we cannot be personally rejected. If they say no, they said no to a company. If something goes wrong, the team will look into it. Every time you say it you put something between yourself and the other person, and what you put there is not real.

You were standing behind something that does not exist, and you have never once needed a screen. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his own pronoun has been doing, and the written word puts God's delight on the weight that tells the truth in Proverbs 11:1.

And here is the cost, and it is not what you expect. It is not that somebody finds out. Most people never do and most people do not care. The cost is that the one genuinely good thing about your work is the thing you keep hiding.

The reason they ring you is that it is you. You answer. You turn up. You did the last one. And we takes that away, because we could be anybody, and anybody is not who they called.

You are the reason they called, and the we has never once improved on that. His Spirit is the one who puts a man back into his own sentences, and Proverbs 11:1 makes the honest measure the thing God delights in rather than something He merely permits.

One honest pronoun

So here is the change, and it is one word long.

Say I. I can get that done by Thursday. I will come and look at it on Tuesday. I do this on my own, so it will be me who turns up.

You are able to say I, and saying it has never once been an admission of anything. Proverbs 11:1 puts God's delight on a weight that matches what it claims, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a single accurate pronoun available to a man who has used the other one for three years.

Nobody will ask how many staff you have. I have watched men brace for that question for years and it almost never comes, and when it does come the answer is one sentence and the conversation carries on.

And the man who says I do this on my own has told them something useful, which is that the person they are talking to is the person who will be standing in their kitchen.

You were never going to be found out, because there was never anything to find. The Spirit of God carries a plain word past the part of a man that is sure he is not enough on his own, and Proverbs 11:1 has the true measure named as a delight with nothing grudging about it.