The Man on the Mat

Thirty-eight years that man sat by the water. Every time it stirred, somebody else got in first. Getting himself in was the one thing he could not do, and it turned out to be the exact condition the healing arrived in.

I have spent my life making sure I would never be that man.

This is week one of something new. The assignment was thirty minutes of silence and five questions. I am putting the answers here because every hard thing in my life has been handled in the quiet, and quiet is what I inherited and what I have been handing down.

What I Am Afraid To Lose

I am afraid God will call me away from the thing I am already doing and already succeeding at in His name, and make me start over.

Twenty years sits under that. The certifications. The degrees. The company. Competence I can prove. If He moves me, I am a beginner again, and a beginner has no move. He cannot act in his own power. He has to be carried.

That is the fear, and it is the same fear that put fifty-three thousand dollars on my books. It was never about money. It is about having nothing in my hands and having to wait on someone else to act. The debt was just the shape it took when I had a checkbook. Here it takes the shape of a calling.

And I notice how I phrased it. Called away from what I am doing in His name. I have put His name on the one thing I do not want Him to touch. If it is really His, He is allowed to move it. The fact that I flinch when I say that out loud tells me whose it actually is.

Where I Have Been Passive

Everywhere. It took me a while to see it, because I am not a passive man by temperament. I work. I drive. I build plans. I fix things.

The pattern is not laziness. The pattern is that I am active where action is comfortable and passive at the exact points where action would expose me.

I will take a loan. I will not make the sales call. The storefront is built and the door has not opened, and the only thing standing between the two is me asking a stranger for money.

I will pay a bill at three hundred percent interest. I will not let something be late and take the phone call.

I built a foundation for veterans, widows, and orphans on paper. I proposed a service tithe months ago, one pro bono assessment a quarter. I have not done one. That is the pillar with the least under it and I am the reason.

I am present as a father but I am not always leading. I let the day happen, then react to it well, and I have been calling that fatherhood.

Motion has been my avoidance. It looks like the opposite of passivity. That is exactly why I have gotten away with it for twenty years.

Courage That Looks Like Competence

Courage is standing in the face of fear knowing I will probably fail without God’s help, and stepping forward anyway. Arrogance is thinking I can do it on my own, in my own power.

I wrote that definition and then had to sit with the fact that I had already failed my own test. On July 13 I took out a payday loan.

I was not reckless about it. We deliberated for three days. I knew exactly what it would cost, and I signed anyway, because I decided I had to be the one to solve it, in my power, on my timing. Waiting was unbearable. By my own definition that is arrogance, and it did not look like arrogance at all. It looked like responsibility. It looked like a man taking care of his family.

That is the part worth writing down. My arrogance is not loud. It does not look like pride. It looks like competence, and it charges three hundred percent.

There was another decision that same season where I prayed, pushed, and stepped into a room where I might have gotten nothing. I did not know it would work. That one was courage. I could not tell the two apart in the moment. They feel identical from the inside.

The difference is not the amount of force. It is whether I am claiming something already given to me or reaching for something not yet mine. And whether I did it in the open or in the quiet.

What the Silence Said

First, the confession about the silence itself. I did not sit still for thirty minutes. I did it at home, standing, working iaido kata, because that is the only place my head gets quiet enough to hear anything.

The kata is not the failure. That is real prayer and I am keeping it. The failure is that I have built a prayer life that requires my hands to be occupied. Being still with empty hands is the exact condition I have organized my entire life to avoid, and when I go looking for stillness, I reach for the practice where there is a sword in my hands. Same helplessness as the first question. I told myself I need it that way so I am not in a void.

I cannot tolerate the void. That is the whole thing, right there, in my own words.

And here is what He showed me. I outrun my own prayers. I have been asking God to do a thing and then moving before the answer, and I have never once been able to tell whether He answered or whether I just got there first.

The Two Moves

I thought about announcing this and calling that the bold step. Announcing a journey gets admired. That is not bold, that is a press release. If I write, it has to be the confession and not the plan. The real number. The payday loan. Not the strategy.

So the writing comes third, behind two things that actually cost me something.

The first was saying the number out loud. Not on a spreadsheet. Out loud, to people who can look at me while I say it, including our financial counselor. That part is done. What is new today is that it is no longer only said in rooms I control. It is here, where anyone can read it.

The second is the sales call. It is on the calendar for Wednesday. A name and a date. One human being, one scheduled time, where I have to ask for money and might be told no. That is the exact place I have been passive for years, and it fits my own definition of courage, because I will probably fail at it without His help.

I will write what happens after Wednesday. Whether it goes well or it does not.

Lord, I have spent my life making sure I would never be the man on the mat. You healed the man on the mat. Teach me to be still long enough for You to be the one who moves, and give me the sense to know which is which.

Week one. I am learning that the void is not the absence of God. It is the room He works in.