I Can Solve It For Anybody Else

Ross counted them once, on a bad night, and there were eleven.

Eleven people, over about six years, who had come to him with a version of the same thing he has been unable to decide about himself since 2024. He is not being falsely modest here: he was good with all eleven. Two of them have told him since that the conversation was the turning point, and one sent him a card, which he still has in the drawer and does not look at.

He can do it. Put the situation in front of him with somebody else's name on it and he can see the shape of it in about four minutes. He asks the right question. He does not push. He is careful about what he does not know, and people relax around him because of it.

Put his own name on the same situation and there is nothing. Not confusion exactly. Fog.

He has tried the obvious trick, which everybody suggests eventually, of writing it out as though it were somebody else's. It does not work. He gets three lines in and something in him knows the trick is being played and the fog comes back.

He has started to suspect this means something bad about him. That is the part he would not say out loud. Some sort of hypocrisy, or a failure of nerve, or evidence that all eleven conversations were a performance he happened to be good at.

He is fifty-one and it has been two years.

You may know the drawer with the card in it.

Maybe people come to you. Maybe you are the one who is good in a crisis that is not yours. And maybe you have started to draw an unkind conclusion about what the difference means.

It is not hypocrisy, and here is why

Let me deal with the accusation first, because it is doing more damage than the indecision.

You are not a hypocrite. A hypocrite gives advice he does not believe. You believe every word you said to those eleven people and you would say it again tomorrow.

What is actually happening is a matter of position, and it is completely ordinary.

When somebody else's situation is in front of you, you are outside it. You can see all of it at once, and you are not carrying the cost of being wrong, and your own history is not sitting in the middle of the picture bending the light.

When it is yours, you are inside it. You cannot see the whole shape because you are standing in it, and every option has a consequence that lands on you and on people you love, and that is not fog caused by a defect. That is what being a participant does to visibility.

Nobody sees their own situation from outside. That is not a personal failing; it is the definition of being in something.

And you are not looking at hypocrisy when you look at that gap. The written word says the heart is deceitful above all things and who can know it, and it says it about everybody rather than about a subgroup, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a relief in a man who has been building a case against himself.

And nothing about you is under review for this. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who counted to eleven on a bad night.

Whose eyes do the guiding

There is a verse in Psalm 32 where God says how the guiding actually happens, and the image is startling once you notice it.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.Psalm 32:8

With mine eye.

Not with yours. The whole difficulty you have been having is a visibility problem, and this sentence hands the seeing to somebody who is not standing inside your situation.

And look at the three verbs and who does all of them. Instruct, teach, guide. Every one of them has God as the subject and you as the object. There is no clause in that verse where you are asked to achieve clarity.

Which means the fog is not the obstacle you thought it was. You have been trying to get outside your own life so that you can see it the way you see other people's, and the verse offers something else entirely: not your vision improved, but His used.

And you are being guided by an eye that is not standing where you are standing. The word puts the seeing in Him and the going in you, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real division of labor rather than a comforting phrase.

And you were never required to see it clearly first. The word gives all three verbs to Him and none to you, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than waiting for the fog to lift.

What you would say to the twelfth person

Now, one practical thing, and I offer it carefully because I am not going to direct your life from here and this is not that.

You have said, to eleven people, some version of a sentence you have never once said to yourself. I do not know what your sentence is. You do.

It is worth finding out what it is. Not to obey it, and not because you are the authority on your own life. Because you have a piece of your own counsel sitting in a room you have never carried it into, and there is no rule anywhere that says a man may not hear his own good sentence.

And then leave it. Do not decide tonight.

And you are able to hear your own counsel without it being arrogance. The word says a word spoken in due season, how good is it, and it does not attach a clause about the speaker being disqualified from hearing it, and the Spirit is the one who makes a sentence land in the man who said it.