The Work He Stopped in the Middle

He opens it most weeks. That is the part that should have told him something years ago.

It is one file with eleven others feeding it, and it is nine years of work, and it is about two thirds done. He knows precisely what the remaining third requires because he wrote the plan for it himself and the plan is good.

He opens it, reads a page, and closes it again. Sometimes he fixes a typo, which is worse than not opening it.

He stopped in the spring of a year he can name exactly, and there was no crisis attached. Nothing happened at work. Nobody criticized it. What happened is that he arrived, over about six months, at a conclusion, and the conclusion was that there was not going to be anybody to read it.

Not that it was bad. That the readership, the whole quiet chain of people who would have picked it up in fifteen or twenty years, was not going to exist.

He has never written that sentence down and he has never said it to his wife, and if you put it to him directly he would want to argue with the way it was phrased, because it sounds cruder than it feels.

He is fifty six. Nine years of good work is a long time and two thirds is an unbearable place to stop.

Sit down at the desk. There is a proverb about what a man leaves behind that goes at exactly this.

He leaves an inheritance

Here it is, and it is short and it assumes a great deal.

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.Proverbs 13:22

Two generations forward. Not to his children, which is ordinary. To his children's children, which is a person he may well never meet.

That is stated flatly, in a book of wisdom, as a description of what a good man does. There is no hedging about circumstances and no clause about whether the world will still be there.

You are inside a description of a good man rather than outside it. Proverbs 13:22 assumes two generations forward as the normal horizon of somebody living well, and the Spirit inspired it without a single condition attached about how much time remains.

And an inheritance in that book is not only money. It is what a man hands over. Work, name, trade, knowledge, a going concern. Nine years of scholarship left two thirds finished is an inheritance that has been stopped mid sentence.

The conclusion you reached

Now the conclusion itself, because it was reached over six months and has never once been examined in the years since.

It is a prediction. It does not present itself as one because it is not about a date and it is not about a chart, and it arrived in the respectable form of a general expectation. But it makes a claim about the future, and nobody was given that claim.

And it was applied with remarkable precision. It did not stop you working. It did not stop you at the office, or in the garden, or with the family. It stopped exactly one thing: the piece of work that reaches furthest forward.

That is worth noticing. A general belief about how much time there is should stop everything or nothing. Yours stopped the single item with the longest horizon, which is the behavior of something aimed rather than of a conviction.

You are still holding the thing itself. Proverbs 13:22 assumes a man works with two generations in view, and the Spirit did not put that conclusion in you in the spring of a year you can name exactly.

You did not receive that from God. Nothing written anywhere told a man to stop in the middle, and the Spirit does not produce a conclusion that reaches into a desk and closes one file.

Two thirds is the worst place to stop

Here is the practical part, and it is about the state of the thing rather than about your motives.

Two thirds finished is not a body of work and it is not nothing. It is the least useful possible position, because it is too much to abandon and too little to be picked up by anybody else.

That is the actual cost, and it is not spiritual. Somebody who wanted to finish it after you could not, because the last third exists only as a plan in your own head, and a plan in a head is not an inheritance, it is a rumor of one.

So finish it, or write the plan out properly so that it could be finished by somebody else. Either of those is an act of the kind Proverbs describes. What is not is a file that gets opened and closed.

And the second of those is available this month rather than in some future year when the appetite comes back. Writing the plan out properly is perhaps three weeks of evenings for a man who already has it in his head. It does not require you to believe anything in particular about the future, and it converts a rumor into an inheritance, and it can be done by somebody who is not sure.

You are permitted to reach that far forward. What is written puts a good man's horizon at two generations, and the Spirit is not asking a scholar of fifty six to only do work that pays out within his own sight.

And tell your wife. Nine years is a large thing to have stopped without her being told why.

She knows something happened. People who live with a person notice when a room goes quiet, and she will have supplied her own explanation for it years ago, and it will be worse than the true one. The true one is that you talked yourself into a prediction and it took a piece of your work. That is embarrassing to say out loud and it is a great deal less alarming than most of the alternatives she has had available to her.