Frozen Between Two Towns

There is a pull-off about halfway, on the ridge, where you can see both valleys. He has stopped there fourteen times since March. He knows it is fourteen because he started counting somewhere around the seventh.

North is the town where his work is and where he has been renting a room from a man he likes and does not know. South is the town where his mother and two of his brothers are and where there is a job that pays less and a house that would be his in a year if the family thing goes the way everybody assumes.

Neither one holds still. That is his actual problem and he has never once been able to say it in a way that anybody understands. The northern job is real but the contract runs to December and after that nobody knows. The southern house depends on a conversation that has not happened between three people who avoid conversations. Every time he gets close to weighing them, one side moves, and the weighing has to start again.

So he stops on the ridge. Fourteen times. Sits on the tailgate for twenty minutes and looks at both valleys and drives back to whichever one he came from.

He is thirty-eight and he told a friend last month that he feels like a man who has been standing up for a year.

Anybody stuck between two lives knows this. And I am going to say at the start that I am not going to tell anybody which town. I do not know his mother, his brothers, that job or that house. Anybody who picks a valley for a stranger from a distance is playing a game with somebody else's life.

Lean on something that is not the analysis

Let me put down the pair of lines and look at what is actually being contrasted.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.Proverbs 3:5-6

Lean not unto thine own understanding is almost always misread as an instruction to stop thinking, and it is not. Proverbs is a book about thinking. Nine chapters of it are an advertisement for wisdom.

The verb is lean. It is a weight word. Solomon is not telling anybody to stop analyzing. He is telling them not to put their weight on the analysis, and for a man on a ridge that is the entire distinction, because he has been analyzing well and standing on the analysis, and the analysis keeps moving.

You are able to keep thinking and stop leaning on the thinking, and those two have never been the same instruction. That is not a soft word for a man who has stopped fourteen times. It is what is written in Proverbs 3, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and puts it under somebody on a tailgate. The towns move. What you lean on does not have to.

And then the promise: he shall direct thy paths. The verb behind direct is about making straight or making level, and it is not a prediction about the destination. It is a description of what happens to the road under a person who is going.

You have a path that gets made straight as you walk it rather than before you set out. Proverbs 3:6 is the text this sits on, and it is the Spirit who makes an old proverb land on a ridge with the light going.

Nobody is going to be told which valley

Now the part this category exists for.

A year of not choosing is not paralysis in the sense people mean it as an insult. This man is not weak and he is not avoiding. He has been trying to do something genuinely impossible, which is to weigh two things that will not sit still, and failing at an impossible task is not a character defect.

And I want to name what has actually been happening, because I think nobody has. He has been waiting for one of the two to become solid enough to be chosen. That is a completely reasonable plan and it has one flaw: neither of them is going to. The northern contract will always run out at some point. The southern house will always depend on people. There is no version of the future in which he stands on the ridge and one of the valleys has become certain.

Commit thy works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be established.Proverbs 16:3

Notice which end gets established in that verse. Not the works. The thoughts. It describes a mind steadying because something was handed over, which is the opposite direction from the one everybody assumes.

You were promised a settled mind rather than settled circumstances, and the settling happens at the handing over. Proverbs 16:3 is where the word puts it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a mind that has been recalculating since March.

You are steady right now, on this ridge, with both valleys exactly as unresolved as they were in the spring. It is written that He directs the paths of the one who acknowledges Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that true in a man who feels like he has been standing up for a year.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly about the year and about the fourteen stops. A person stalled this long deserves a real person in the room, and being steadied by God has never been a substitute for one.