I Could Not Tell You Where It Went

If somebody asked you tonight where last month went, you could not tell them.

Not because anything dramatic happened to it. It went the way most money goes, which is in forty small pieces, none of which was a decision exactly, and by the end of the month it was gone and the individual pieces had left no impression at all.

And when you admit that, in the rare cases where you do, what comes back is a lecture. Somebody tells you about an app, or a spreadsheet, or a system with categories in it, and you nod, and you have downloaded three of those over the years and used each of them for eleven days.

I want to do something completely different today, and I want to be clear at the top that this site gives no financial advice, has no budget in it, and is not going to comment on a single thing you spent money on.

Know the state of what you have

There is a proverb about a farmer, and it is not about accounting, it is about attention, and the Holy Spirit has kept it in Scripture for people who are frightened of their own statements.

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. (Proverbs 27:23, King James Version)

Know the state of thy flocks.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say count them, and it does not say improve them, and it does not say get more of them. It says know the state. Be aware of what is actually there.

That is a much gentler instruction than the one you have been given by every app you ever deleted. It is not a management system. It is an instruction to look, and to look with enough regularity that you are not surprised.

Proverbs 27:23 puts knowing before doing anything at all, and does not attach an action to it in that verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that be received as permission to look rather than as a demand to organize.

You are being asked to know rather than to manage, and there has never once been a system attached to it. Proverbs 27:23 says be thou diligent to know the state, with no instruction to change it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates looking from being called to account.

Why the apps did not survive

Let me say why eleven days is the standard lifespan of a budgeting app in a house like yours, because it is not that you lack discipline.

It is that every one of those systems is built on categorizing, and categorizing is judging. Proverbs 27:23 asks for none of it, and the Holy Spirit is not requesting a taxonomy of anybody's week.

The moment you assign a line to a category, you have made a claim about what kind of thing it was, and about halfway through the first month you will hit something that was necessary and looks frivolous, or was frivolous and you would defend to the death, and the system will make you file it.

And filing it is a verdict. So you stop.

The instruction in Proverbs 27:23 has no categories in it, and the Holy Spirit is not asking for a taxonomy of your week, only for you to be somebody who knows what is there.

You are not required to sort anything, and the categories have never once been the part that helped. The written word says know the state of thy flocks, which asks for awareness rather than for classification, and the Spirit of God is the one who removes a verdict from an act of attention.

Read it, all the way down

So here is the assignment, and it is once rather than ongoing.

Read one month, all the way to the bottom.

Not sort it. Not total it by type. Not decide anything. Read it, the way you would read a page of a book, from the top to the end, including the bits you would rather skim past.

You will want to react. Something in there will make you wince and you will want to explain it to yourself, and if you start explaining you will stop reading, so notice the wince and keep going.

It takes about twenty minutes. And what happens at the end of it is not a plan. What happens is that you now know, which is what Proverbs 27:23 actually asked for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes knowing bearable when a person has been avoiding it for years.

You are able to read it once, and it has never once required a decision at the end. Proverbs 27:23 asks for the state to be known and stops there, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present while somebody reads twenty minutes of ordinary transactions.