When It Gets Worse I Will Go

Every article on this site opens with the same sentence and this one will too. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page stands in the place of a clinic or a pharmacist. This page has one job: a phone call. If it belongs to you, make it before you get to the bottom of this.

Now. You have a line.

You did not write it down. You would not call it a plan. But there is a point in your head where you have agreed with yourself that you would go, and everything short of that point is something to be managed.

Here is the question, and take a moment over it. Where was that line when you first drew it?

Because I think it has moved. I think it started somewhere reasonable, and then when things got to it, the line quietly relocated a little further out, and you did not experience that as moving it. You experienced it as being sensible.

And then it happened again. And here you are, on the other side of a line you drew twice ago, still waiting to reach one.

The warning is about a day nobody owns

There is a proverb about tomorrow that people usually read as a warning against arrogance, and it is really a warning about a much quieter thing.

Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. (Proverbs 27:1, King James Version)

Boasting about tomorrow does not have to sound like boasting. It rarely does. It usually sounds like a calm man saying he will deal with it when he needs to, which is a sentence that assumes he has been given the day in which to deal with it.

That assumption is the whole subject of the verse. Not pride. An assumption.

You are holding a plan that quietly assumes a day nobody has handed you, and the assuming has never once been the same as having. Proverbs 27:1 says plainly that thou knowest not what a day may bring forth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man the small confident sentence he has been living on.

I am not trying to frighten you and I am not going to hint at anything, because I do not know anything. What the proverb removes is not your safety. It removes the idea that a later date is something anybody actually owns.

You have been spending a currency that has never once been in your pocket. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a man honest about his own arithmetic, and it is written that nobody knows what a day may bring forth, said to everybody rather than to the reckless.

A moving line is not a threshold at all

Let me be plain about the mechanism, because the mechanism is the interesting part.

A threshold that moves every time you reach it is not a threshold. It is a way of never going, dressed up as a decision.

And the thing that makes it so effective is that at every single step it feels reasonable. Nobody ever decides to avoid an appointment for a year. A man decides, eleven separate times, that this particular week is not quite the week.

You are not a man who refuses to go, and that has never once been the problem here. Proverbs 27:1 addresses somebody making a perfectly ordinary assumption about the calendar rather than somebody being defiant, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man see the shape of eleven reasonable decisions laid end to end.

And there is a second thing that nobody mentions. The line is not neutral. Every time it moves, the going gets harder, because now the going means admitting that the previous line was moved.

You were never going to reach a line you are allowed to move, and no threshold has ever once held when the same man owns both ends of it. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a decision out of a man's own bargaining, and what is written puts tomorrow outside the reach of the person planning around it.

The plain routing, which does not have a threshold on it

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and there is no soft way to put it on a page like this.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and there is no line to reach first, it is now. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And the thing you have been measuring against your own line goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, at whatever level it is at, with no threshold attached.

You are allowed to go before anything qualifies, and nobody has ever once been sent home for arriving early. Proverbs 27:1 removes the confident later date and leaves the day a man is actually standing in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves somebody from the bargaining to the phone.

They are not going to laugh at you. They are not going to tell you off for wasting a slot. That is a story men tell each other and it is not true in any clinic I have ever known.

You have a door that has never once had a minimum on it, and the passage has never once made the going wait on a qualification. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man through the first sentence of a call he did not want to make, and what is written leaves nobody holding the morrow.