They Told Me the Number

They said it in a normal voice, the way you say a number that is part of your job, and then they waited, and something in you did a very fast piece of arithmetic and came out with nothing.

And what you said was that you would have a think.

I want to talk about the walk to the car, because I think that is where the actual damage happens. Not at the counter. In the car park, where the arithmetic stops being about money and turns into a sentence about you.

Somebody who really loved him would find it.

That sentence is not true, and it is very persuasive, and almost nobody says it out loud, which is exactly why it does its work unopposed.

Pour it out

There is a short instruction in the Psalms about what to do with a thing you cannot carry, and the language is deliberately unrefined.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah. (Psalm 62:8, King James Version)

Pour out your heart.

Not present it. Not compose it. Pour it out, which is what you do with a container you want empty, and which does not imply any arrangement of the contents.

There is nothing in Psalm 62:8 about the thing being spiritual enough to bring. It is addressed to ye people, which is about as unselective as an address gets, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary financial panic something a person can actually say out loud to God.

So the number goes to Him. Just as it is. In the car.

You are allowed to bring the bare thing, and it has never once needed to be dressed up first. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before him with no condition attached to the contents, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a figure on a piece of paper something a person can pray about honestly.

The sentence in the car park

Now let me take that sentence apart, because it is doing real harm and it deserves to be dismantled properly.

Somebody who really loved him would find it.

The first thing wrong with it is that it converts a fact about your bank account into a fact about your character, and those are not connected. Money measures money. It has never measured love, and everybody knows this in every other context, and it stops being obvious the moment it is your own animal and your own account.

The second thing is that it is unanswerable, which is how you can tell it is not from God. There is no amount at which the sentence would let you off. Find half of it and it says you should have found all of it. Find all of it and it will find something else.

And the third thing is that it is being said by you, to you, in a car, with nobody there to contradict it. That is the worst arrangement for a hard sentence, and Psalm 62:8 is an instruction to get it out of that arrangement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person somewhere to put it.

You are not being measured by what you can find, and the amount has never once been the evidence. The written word says God is a refuge for us, addressed to people with nothing in their hands, and the Spirit of God is the one who breaks up an argument a person is losing to themselves.

Say it to a person as well

There is a second half to this and it is more practical.

Say the number out loud to one person. Not to ask for it. To end the isolation of it.

The reason is that an unspoken figure grows. It becomes the whole of your week and it gets larger every day it is not said, and the moment it is spoken to a human being it goes back to being a number rather than an atmosphere.

And then, separately, go back and ask the vet what the options actually are. Not what you should do. What the options are. That is a different question and it is one they can answer, and most people never ask it because asking it feels like admitting something.

I am not going to tell you what to choose, and this site will never tell you what an animal needs, because that belongs entirely to somebody qualified. Psalm 62:8 puts the pouring out and the refuge together rather than promising an outcome, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody back through a door they walked out of.

You are able to ask a plain question, and asking has never once been the same as failing. Psalm 62:8 sends people to a refuge rather than to a solution, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an honest conversation possible for somebody who is ashamed.