Go Back In · Week 2 · Saturday

On Sunday I said that in my businesses every receivable counts, and that this is why Levi walking away from an open booth reads to me as a man leaving money on a table rather than as a career change.

Here is what that sentence meant one particular month.

The actual story

A contractor owed us. The invoice went past due, then well past due, and I knew enough about his situation to know he was not stalling me. He was underwater and there was nothing at the bottom of that well to pull up.

So I let it go.

That is the entire good deed and I do not want to dress it up, because it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what happened next, which nobody puts on a poster.

What it actually cost

Letting it go meant the money was not there. Not in principle — in that month, in that account.

So we held off on a few purchases.

And holding off on those purchases meant we were slower to deliver on things we had already promised to other people. People who had no part in any of this. People who had never heard of the contractor, would not have cared if they had, and simply experienced a delay from us with no explanation attached to it, because the explanation was not mine to give them.

The bill did not stop with me. It went sideways.

That is the part I did not see coming and would not have predicted. I thought releasing a claim was a transaction between me and one man. It was not. Mercy has a cost, the cost is real money and real time, and it does not confine itself neatly to the person being merciful.

I have read this verse for years as a comfort, and I still do. That month I also read it as an invoice.

If You, O LORD, kept track of iniquities, then who, O Lord, could stand?Psalm 130:3 (BSB)

Where I actually land

I do not think business is just money in and out. Not if you are a Christian. I want to state that as a position rather than as a question, because I would make the same call again and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

But I am not going to tell you it felt like generosity at the time. It felt like being short. It felt like sitting on a call explaining a delay to somebody who deserved better than a delay, using a reason that was true and that I could not say out loud.

There was no moment in any of it that felt like the right thing. It felt like an expensive decision I had already made and was now paying for in installments, which is roughly what it was.

The booth

Which brings it back to where the week started.

On hearing this, Jesus told them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”Mark 2:17 (BSB)

Levi got up mid-shift and left the books open. That was not free either. Somebody absorbed what was on those pages — the people he had taken from did not get made whole by his walking away from the desk, and the man himself walked out of the only trade he had.

Whatever you put down this week — the seat you were earning, the presence you were faking, the money you were owed, the name you would not seat, the verdict you would not release — it did not vanish when you let go of it.

You are carrying it now. That is what it costs.

That is not the inspiring version of this week. It is the accurate one, and I would rather you know it before you try any of it than afterward.

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