The Lane Beside the Blocks

He is twenty-nine now and it took him twelve years to be able to say the sentence out loud, and when he finally did it came out sounding like nothing at all.

He was seventeen. It was the end of a season. There was a man, an adult he respected, who said it in front of everybody, cheerfully, as praise, the way you say a thing that you believe is the best compliment available: this one right here is the best asset this program has had in ten years.

Everybody laughed. Somebody slapped his back. It was a good night and he was proud of it and he told his mother in the car.

And he has not been able to receive a compliment since without running it through a check.

That is the whole injury and it sounds small when you write it down, which is why he never wrote it down. He is not damaged in some visible way. He finished school, he works, he is well liked. But somebody says nice things to him and there is a half-second delay while a question runs underneath: what is being valued here, and what happens to it when it stops being worth anything.

He worked out the shape of it about four years ago and it has taken until now to say it plainly. An asset is a thing on a ledger. An asset is held for what it produces. Nobody keeps an asset out of affection, and every asset in the world eventually depreciates, and he was seventeen and standing on a wet deck being told, in front of people he liked, that this was the category he was in.

Nobody meant harm. That is the part that has kept him from ever mentioning it. There was no villain. There was a tired man in his fifties reaching for the biggest praise he had.

And you know that sentence. Somebody handed you a valuation before you were old enough to decline it, and if it arrived as praise it is nearly impossible to set down, because refusing it looks like ingratitude and examining it looks like sulking.

Take this in before we go one line further, because I think you have already braced to be told you are reading too much into it. You are not reading too much into it and you were not too soft to take a compliment. Psalm 139:14 says you are fearfully and wonderfully made and it says it as a plain settled fact rather than as encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is standing on this deck with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The word for a thing a king keeps

There is a line near the end of Malachi that gets read as a bit of poetry and is actually a legal term.

And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.Malachi 3:17

The word rendered jewels is a word for treasured personal property. It is the term used for what belongs to a king personally rather than to the kingdom, the things that are his own, kept back from the general accounts.

That distinction is the whole verse. Everything a kingdom owns is an asset. It is inventoried, valued, deployed, and eventually spent, because that is what an asset is for. What a king keeps personally is not on that ledger. It is not held because of what it produces. It is held because it is his and he wants it.

You are personal property of the King and you have never been on the kingdom's ledger. The written word uses the term for what a sovereign keeps out of the general accounts and then says spare them, which is the language of preserving rather than of deploying; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that distinction onto a pool deck twelve years after a sentence was said out loud.

And notice the second half of the verse, because it moves the register again. As a man spares his own son that serves him. The son serves. There is real work in that sentence. But the sparing is not because of the serving, it is because of the son.

Why praise is the hardest thing to set down

I want to be honest about why this has run for twelve years, because if I pretend a compliment should be easy to hold lightly you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

An insult can be rejected. Everything in you lines up against it immediately, and even if it lands you know what it is. Praise gets past all of that. It comes in with the door held open. It arrives from somebody you respect, in front of people, in a good moment, and there is no part of you that is on guard, because nothing in the situation is asking you to be.

So a valuation delivered as praise does not get examined. It gets accepted, and installed, and it lives in the part of you that decides what compliments mean, and you cannot go back and question it later without seeming to question a good night that a lot of people remember fondly.

You were not soft to take it in, and you were seventeen and it came as the best praise the man had. Deuteronomy 32:10 says He found him in a waste howling wilderness and He led him about and instructed him and kept him as the apple of His eye, and every one of those verbs belongs to God; His Spirit does that keeping at whatever pace He chooses and asks nothing of you to earn it.

And there is a second half, and it is the one that costs. Being an asset has advantages. Assets are wanted. Assets get selected, invested in, spoken well of. There is a genuine fear in setting down a category that has been reliably delivering good treatment since you were fifteen, even once you know what it is doing to you.

You are not being asked to give up anything, and nobody is checking your gratitude. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and it is a statement about where He already is rather than an offer that has to be taken up; the same Spirit doing that drawing near is the one who finally got the sentence out of your mouth after twelve years.

And if what came up on that deck is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you can say one true sentence in front of.

What happens to an asset

Here is the question underneath all of it, and it is worth asking straight out.

What happens to an asset when it stops producing.

You already know the answer, and you have known it since you were seventeen, and it is the reason there is a half-second delay whenever anybody says something kind to you. An asset is retained while it performs. That is not cynicism, that is simply what the word means, and a seventeen-year-old who is told he is one has been handed a countdown along with the compliment.

And that is exactly what Malachi is answering. He is not saying you are a very good asset. He is saying you were never in that column. There is a second book, and the things in it are not valued and not deployed and not spent, and they are described with the language of a father sparing his own son.

You are being kept, not held, and the difference between those is the whole of it. Scripture says they shall be mine in the day when I make up my jewels, and the making up is an act of a king gathering what is personally his; the Holy Spirit is the one who is moving a man off a ledger he was entered on at seventeen.

So the deck is not where you were valued. It is where a tired man reached for the biggest word he had and got it wrong, and where a boy heard the word and believed it, and God was there and did not agree with the accounting.