Open Hands · Week 1 · Thursday · STRESS
He has never lied to her. He wants that on the record, and as far as it goes it is true.
He has only arranged things. A message written at nine and sent at eleven, because eleven does not look eager. A study spot chosen because of who walks past it. A route to campus that is four minutes longer and reliably crosses hers. He could tell you the schedule to the minute, and he has never once said any of this out loud to anyone.
None of it is a lie. Every individual piece of it is defensible. And all of it together is a system for producing an outcome in another person.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves.Philippians 2:3 (BSB)
The Tell Is Underneath
The thing I would want him to see is not the behavior. Timing a message is not a great sin, and a young man trying to be where someone is has been the shape of the world for a very long time.
The tell is what has to be true underneath for the system to make sense. It only runs if he believes that the moment he stops managing it, it stops. That left alone, unmanaged, unengineered, this does not go his way.
Which is a statement about God, not about her.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding;Proverbs 3:5 (BSB)
His own understanding is the four-minute detour. It is a real strategy and it probably works a little, and that is what makes it so hard to put down — not that it fails, but that it partly succeeds.
You do not manage an outcome you believe God is handling.
What It Cost
He stopped. There was no confession and no dramatic conversation, and she has no idea any of this happened, which is as it should be.
He just started sending messages when he wrote them. He took the normal way to campus. He stopped studying in the spot he had chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with studying.
The cost is not hypothetical. It may come to nothing at all. That is the actual price, and it is not softened by saying it out loud: he gave up the levers and he might lose the thing.
What he handed back is the right to produce it himself. Which, if he thinks about it in a year, is also the only way he could ever find out whether she actually wanted him — or wanted the version of him that kept appearing at the right moment.
He is letting it be hers to answer.
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