The Trail Map Beneath the Clipboard

For the volunteer with a better route sketched in pencil and nobody coming to tell him he is qualified to sketch it.

When Gideon was called, he was threshing wheat in a winepress and hiding from raiders, and the first word he heard was that the Lord was with him as a mighty man of valor. He answered by pointing out how small his family was and how young he was in it.

That conversation is worth sitting beside for a moment, because the gap between what God said and what Gideon believed about himself was enormous. He wasn't arguing. He was reporting, accurately, where he stood in the pecking order of his own house.

Now look at the map under your clipboard. Pencil, on the back of an old printed sheet, showing a route that keeps walkers off the eroding bank and adds about ninety meters. You walked it in the rain in April to be sure. You haven't said a word to anybody for six months.

You are not short of a route, you are short of somebody telling you that a man like you is allowed to draw one. Scripture calls people whose own view of themselves is far smaller than the work, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the sketch under that clipboard.

What You Believe a Sketch Requires

Be exact about what stops you, because it is not the drawing and it is not the walking. Both of those are done.

What stops you is handing it to the woman who coordinates the site. In your head, doing that means claiming to know the land better than the people who wrote the original route, and you have decided that such a claim requires a standing you do not have.

Look at what you would actually be handing over. A pencil line and a measurement. It says the bank is going and walkers are making it worse, and here is a way round that costs ninety meters. That's an observation from a man who was there in April with wet boots. It is not a claim about anybody.

You are carrying an observation, not a verdict on the people who came before you. The written Word keeps honesty and honor in the same hand rather than at odds, and the Holy Spirit never leads a man to correct a neighbor in order to stand above him.

Once the accusation comes out of it, the sketch is what it always was. A line, a number, and a bank that is going whether anybody says anything or not.

Where the Authority Genuinely Sits

There is a real boundary here and honoring it is part of the work. This land is governed. There are rules about where a path may go, who decides, and what may be cut or moved, and those rules protect ground that cannot protect itself.

So the question is not whether you may re-route the trail. You may not, and you've never wanted to. The question is what you are free to do with a sketch, and the answer is wider than you have been using.

You are free to walk it again and write the erosion down. You are free to hand the sheet to the coordinator and say nothing more than what you saw. You are free to let her decide, which is what she is there for and what she would almost certainly rather you did than watch a bank go for another season.

You are free inside the permission you hold, and that freedom has always included telling the truth about a slope. Scripture never asks a person to sit on a fact in order to be respectful, and the Holy Spirit makes the line between honoring an authority and hiding from one perfectly clear.

None of this asks you to move a marker, cut anything, or decide something that belongs to somebody else. It asks you to hand over a piece of paper.

What You Have Been Calling Deference

There is a name you have given to the last six months, and the name is deference. It sounds about right. A man who does not push forward, who would rather wait for somebody senior to notice the bank, looks entirely respectful from the outside.

Test it against what deference actually does. Deference makes way for another person's decision, which is exactly what handing over a sketch does, because the decision stays with her. Deference accepts a no without sulking. Deference does the unglamorous work when nobody is watching, which is what walking a wet bank in April happens to be.

Now test the silence. Whose decision has it made way for? Nobody's, because nobody has been given anything to decide. What has it cost? Six months of a bank going, which is small, and is also the precise thing you volunteered to prevent.

You are not deferring, you are withholding a fact and calling it respect. The written Word calls honor a posture toward others rather than a reason to keep quiet, and the Holy Spirit tells a willing man the difference without shaming him for it.

That's said kindly. You didn't build this habit on purpose, and nobody needs to humiliate you out of it. You need only stop calling it a virtue, because a virtue is very hard to put down.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Tahoma This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.