Pricing A Job He Cannot Afford

The folder is on the bench where the work should be, and it is thicker than it was this time last year.

He has costed the whole job nine times. Every board, every fixing, the timber by the meter and where it is cheaper if you go for it yourself and take the trailer. He has it three ways on paper: the proper way, the way with the cheaper stuff, and the way where he does the parts nobody would notice with what he can salvage.

None of the three work.

He is not fooling himself and he is not being dramatic about it. He has done the arithmetic more carefully than most people do anything, and the answer comes out the same every time, and the answer is no.

So he has not put a hand to one inch of it.

Not one. In fourteen months. The site is exactly as it was, except that there is now a folder.

Here is the thing he said out loud in the truck about a month ago, and then wished he had not.

His father would have started.

That is simply true. The old man would have got up one morning and done the bit he could do, badly if necessary, out of whatever was lying about, and it would have been ugly and half of it would have had to come out again later and he would not have lost a minute's sleep over it.

And he has his father's hands. Everybody says so. He has the skill and the eye and he can do things that man could do.

He has not got whatever else his father had, and he has been trying for fourteen months to work out what that missing thing is called.

If you have been costing a job instead of doing it, come and sit on the bench end. There is tea in that flask and nobody out here is looking at your folder.

The question God asked a man who was listing what he lacked

There is an exchange at a burning bush where a man gives a long and entirely accurate account of everything he does not have, and God interrupts him with four words.

And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.Exodus 4:2

Moses is mid-argument. He has explained that he is nobody, that he cannot speak, that they will not believe him, and every point he makes is reasonable and most of them are true.

And God does not answer any of it. He asks what is already in the man's hand.

It is a stick. That is all it is. It is the thing he happens to be holding because he has been walking about with sheep, and it is not equipment for the job he is being sent to do, and it is not enough by any measure anybody could apply.

It is what was there.

You are being asked what is already in your hands rather than what the job requires. Exodus 4:2 has God cutting across a man's accurate list of shortages with a question about the thing he was holding, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that question in exactly that place, which means the folder on that bench is being answered with a question about your hands.

What the costing is actually doing

Now the folder, and let us be fair to it, because a man who costs a job properly is not a man avoiding work.

Every figure in it is right. That is not in dispute and it is not the problem.

The problem is what the folder makes possible. As long as the whole job is on paper, the whole job is what has to be affordable, and the whole job is never going to be affordable, and so nothing is ever begun, and the not-beginning feels like realism rather than like a stall.

You have been holding the entire job as the unit of work, and no verse anywhere asks a person to be able to finish before they are allowed to start. Zechariah 4:10 asks who hath despised the day of small things, and it is aimed at the onlookers rather than the builders, and the Spirit of God is named a couple of verses earlier as the way the work gets done at all, which means the smallest possible piece of that job is a legitimate unit and always has been.

What his father actually had

Here is the thing that has been chewed over in the truck for fourteen months, and it has an answer.

What the old man had was not more money and it was not more nerve.

He had a smaller unit. He did not think in jobs. He thought in mornings. He would go out and do what a morning could hold and then have his dinner, and the next morning he would do another one, and after four years there would be a barn, and if you had asked him at the start how he was going to afford a barn he would have looked at you blankly, because he was never once building a barn. He was building a morning.

You were given the same hands and the unit is the only thing missing, and a unit is a decision rather than an inheritance. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, and it puts the finding in the hand rather than in the plan, and it is the same Spirit who filled a workman's hands in the book of Exodus, so the thing you have been trying to name is available this evening.