My Neighbor Does Thirty Things And I Do Three

He does about thirty things and you do three.

You have never counted his properly, but that is the figure in your head, and it has been there for years, and every time you watch him do something new it goes up a little.

And you do three. That number you are sure of.

So there is a gap, and the gap has a size, and you carry it around.

Here is the question that nobody has asked you, and it is going to sound almost too simple.

How many do you need?

Not how many does he do. Not how many are available. How many do you actually need in order to live the life you are living.

You have never worked that out. Not once, in all the years of measuring.

Which means the shortfall you have been carrying was calculated against a number that has nothing to do with you, and the number that would have made it a real calculation has never once been in the sum.

What is that to thee

There is a moment at the end of John where Peter asks about somebody else, and the answer he gets is short.

Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me. (John 21:22, King James Version)

What is that to thee.

Peter has just been given his own instruction. And within about a sentence he has turned round to look at another man and ask what his arrangement is going to be.

You are answered with a question about somebody else, and no comparison to another man's arrangement has ever once been answered any other way. John 21:22 says what is that to thee, follow thou me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who returns a man's attention to his own road.

Notice how gentle and how firm it is at once. He is not scolded. There is no lecture about envy.

The question is simply put back, and then the original instruction is repeated. Follow thou me. The same four words he had been given a moment before.

You have been handed your own instruction again rather than a rebuke, and no man who looked sideways has ever once been given a lecture about it in that passage. The Holy Spirit is the one who repeats the original word instead of correcting the wandering, and it is written that the answer ends with follow thou me and nothing else.

And notice the word thou in it. Follow thou me. The emphasis is deliberate.

It means, you. Your road. This one. The one in front of you and not the one beside you.

You were always given a road with your own name on it, and no man's road anywhere has ever once been measured by the length of the one next to it. The Spirit of God is the one who puts the emphasis on the person being spoken to, and Scripture repeats the instruction with the pronoun stressed on purpose.

The number that has never been in the sum

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not close a gap that has a size.

Do the actual arithmetic, both halves, for once.

His thirty. Your three. And the number nobody has ever calculated, which is how many things your life actually requires of a screen.

Work that one out honestly and it is a small number. It is probably three. It might be four. Which would mean there is no gap at all, and there never has been, and the whole shortfall was produced by leaving one term out of the equation.

You are carrying a shortfall produced by an incomplete sum, and no gap has ever once been real when the number that closes it was never entered. The Spirit of God is the one who completes an arithmetic a man has been doing with one figure missing, and John 21:22 answers a comparison by returning a man to his own instruction.

And here is the second half, which is about his thirty rather than your three.

A good many of his thirty are not needs either. They are things that arrived, or that somebody set up, or that he tried once. He does not use most of them any more than you do.

The difference between the two men is not the count. It is that one of them has never counted, and the other has counted every week for years. Nobody ever told you that, and it is a gap in the teaching rather than a gap in the man.

You have been counting a thing that nobody else on this earth has ever once counted, and no total anybody carries has ever been a total they measured deliberately. The written word puts the question straight back to the one who asked it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man what the man beside him is actually doing.

Write the three

Now the small thing, and it is a piece of paper.

I am not going to suggest you learn anything new. Learning something new would be answering a question that has not been established as a real question yet.

Write down the three things you actually need, and count them.

You are able to write three lines on a piece of paper, and counting what a person actually needs has never once been the smaller arithmetic. John 21:22 answers a sideways look by handing a man back his own road, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a man does his own sum properly.

Write them out. On paper. In your own hand.

Be specific. Not communication. The thing you actually do with it, in the words you would use to describe it to somebody at the gate.

Then count them. Say the number out loud.

And then, if the number is three, sit with that for a minute, because it means the gap you have been carrying does not exist and never did.

You are completing a sum that has been missing a figure for years, and three lines written on paper have never once been beneath a man's dignity. The Spirit of God is the one who lets an honest number land, and it is written that the man was told to follow, with the pronoun stressed, and nothing further was said about anybody else.