In the Evening, Withhold Not Your Hand

He has been doing it for about three years and he only named it in October, in a stationery aisle, holding a notebook.

The notebook was one of the good ones. Two hundred pages, sewn, the sort of thing you buy for a project you are going to be in for a while. He stood there for what he later worked out was more than a minute and then he put it back and picked up a thin one.

And walking to the car he heard the sentence that had made the decision, and it had been running underneath a great many decisions for three years, and it was: there is no point starting something I will not see the end of.

He is seventy six.

Once he had heard it, he found it everywhere. He has not planted the two trees he talked about in twenty twenty two. He did not start the Hebrew, which he has wanted since he was thirty and has now decided is a young man's undertaking. He reads shorter books. He does not take on anything at the synagogue that runs longer than a term.

None of these is a large decision. That is what has made three years of them invisible. Each one, on its own, is prudence.

And what he cannot get away from, since the stationery aisle, is that he has quietly moved from being a man who does things to being a man who assesses whether things will finish, and that the assessment is being run by somebody with no information whatsoever about how long he has.

The school library is where he goes on a Wednesday to help, and after hours the low sun comes through the high windows and lands along the tops of the shelves, and he was standing in it last night with a box of books he had not started sorting.

There is one verse in Ecclesiastes about sowing that puts a morning and an evening in the same sentence.

Withhold not thine hand

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally promises. There is more time than you think. God will give you years to finish it. I am not going to say either. Nobody talking to a man of seventy six about God has been authorized to issue him a lifespan, and a man who is handed one and outlives it or falls short of it has been badly served either way.

Ecclesiastes, which is the book in the Bible least likely to flatter anybody about their remaining time, says this: In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good (Ecclesiastes 11:6).

Read the structure. Morning and evening, both named, both instructed. And then the reason given, which is not encouragement: for thou knowest not.

The not knowing is the argument for sowing rather than against it. That is the opposite of how everybody uses it. He has been reasoning: I do not know how long I have, therefore I should not start. The verse reasons: you do not know which will prosper, therefore work the evening too.

You have been given the evening as working hours. That is not me stretching Ecclesiastes; Ecclesiastes 11:6 names the evening and says withhold not, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line gave the not knowing as the reason for the hand staying open.

And notice the last clause, which almost nobody reads. Or whether they both shall be alike good. It leaves open that the evening sowing is as good as the morning one. Not a consolation for late work. A genuine possibility that it is equal.

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.Ecclesiastes 11:6

Three years of small prudences

Now the thing that has actually happened, because no single decision in it was wrong.

A thin notebook instead of a thick one is not a moral failure. Not taking on a long commitment at seventy six is often wise. Any one of these, examined alone, is a sensible man making a sensible call.

The trouble is the aggregate, and the aggregate has a shape that none of the individual decisions has: three years in which a man has quietly stopped beginning, on the authority of a forecast he is in no position to make.

You have never been in possession of the information that rationing requires. James 4:14 says you do not know what shall be on the morrow, and it says it to everybody rather than to the old; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) did not give a man of seventy six a schedule that a man of thirty was denied.

This is yours right now, standing in a library in the last of the light: an evening that is named in Scripture as sowing time. Ecclesiastes 11:6 puts the evening in the instruction; the Spirit who inspired that verse did not put a cut off in it.

Seeing the end of it was never the arrangement

Let me press the sentence itself, because it contains an assumption he has never examined.

There is no point starting something I will not see the end of.

Who told him that? Not Scripture. Moses did not enter the land. David gathered the materials for a temple somebody else built, and 1 Chronicles 29 records him doing it gladly and in public. Abraham was told about a nation and buried in a field he had to buy.

The Bible is substantially a record of people who began things they did not see the end of, and it does not treat that as tragedy, it treats it as the ordinary condition of anybody who is part of something longer than a life.

You were never promised the end of anything you began. Hebrews 11:13 says these all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off; the Holy Spirit who inspired that verse called that faith rather than failure.

Fruit is not output, and a thin notebook is where the difference shows. Output is a finished thing, dated, with a last page. Fruit is what grows on a man who is still beginning, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, in the morning of a life or in the evening of one.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes when the sun is along the tops of those shelves, tell Him one true thing about the three years with nothing asked for and no time requested. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody measures that.