Good Enough Feels Like Lying

Everybody keeps telling you it is good enough.

And every time somebody says it, something in you tightens, and the tightening is not stubbornness. It is a conscience.

Because good enough is not a description of that job. That job has a thing wrong with it, and the thing is specific, and calling the whole thing good would be saying something that is not true.

So you cannot say it. And the people saying it to you are being kind and are also, slightly, asking you to say a false sentence in order to be at peace, and you would rather have the job unfinished than say a false sentence.

That is not a defect. It is worth having that said plainly, because this is usually treated as perfectionism and it is not the same animal at all. A perfectionist wants it to be right. This is a man who will not say a thing he does not believe.

And here is what nobody has offered you. There is a way to close that job without saying one false word in the whole of it.

You are a man who will not say a false thing, and calling a flawed job finished has never once required anybody to pretend it came out well.

My yoke is easy

There is a sentence at the end of a passage in Matthew about rest, and the thing to notice is what is being offered and what is not.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:30, King James Version)

My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

A yoke is still a yoke. There is a load in that sentence and nobody is pretending otherwise. What is being described is the weight of it rather than the absence of it.

And that is a very precise kind of honesty. It would have been easier to promise no burden at all, and it does not, because that would not have been true and the sentence would have been useless the first time anybody tested it.

You have an offer that keeps the load in the sentence, and a burden called light has never once been a burden being denied. Matthew 11:30 speaks of a yoke and a burden by name and describes their weight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that honesty the thing that can be leaned on.

And the word easy is worth stopping on. It carries the sense of well fitting, of a yoke made for the neck it sits on, rather than the sense of requiring nothing.

Which means the ease being offered is not a pretense about the size of the thing. It is about how it sits.

You were never being offered a pretense, and an easy yoke has never once meant that nothing was being carried. The Spirit of God is the one who fits a thing to a person, and the written word keeps both the yoke and the burden in the sentence rather than removing them.

Two sentences, and both of them true

So here is the practical claim, and it is the whole of what this article has to give.

The reason good enough sticks in your throat is that it is one sentence doing two jobs, and one of them is false.

It says the work is acceptable, which you do not believe, and it says the job is closed, which you could say. The two have been welded together and offered as a unit, and you have been refusing the unit because of the half that is not true.

You have been refusing a package and not a closing, and one false clause in a sentence has never once made the other clause false too. Matthew 11:30 is exact about what it is offering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates two things that have been welded together.

And the separation is simple and nobody teaches it.

Say both sentences. Say the true one about the flaw, out loud, in your own words, plainly. And then say that it is done anyway.

That is not a compromise and it is not a trick. Both of those sentences are true and neither one depends on the other. The join is bad and it is finished. Nothing false has been said and the job is closed.

You have two true sentences available tonight, and a finished thing has never once required anybody to approve of it first. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a close possible without a false word in it, and the written word names the burden and calls it light in the same breath.

And one more, because the conscience in this row is a good one and must not be talked out of anything.

You were right to refuse it, and a refusal to say a false sentence has never once been the thing that was wrong here. Matthew 11:30 does not ask anybody to describe a load as absent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who honors an exact man rather than asking him to be less exact.

Say what is wrong, then say it is done

Here is the assignment and the order is the whole of it.

Say out loud the one true thing that is wrong with it.

Out loud, in the garage, in plain words. The join at the top is out by an eighth and it will always be visible from the left. Whatever the actual accurate sentence is.

You have an accurate sentence about that work and it has never once been a thing you needed permission to say. Matthew 11:30 keeps the load in the sentence rather than removing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that garage while a man says a precise true thing about his own work.

Say it exactly. Do not soften it, and do not exaggerate it either, which is the other temptation and is just as inaccurate.

And then say that it is done anyway. That is the second sentence. It is done.

Two sentences, one after the other, both true, neither one canceling the other.

Then put the tools away. The job is closed, and nothing false was said to close it, and that is what has been unavailable for two years.