Do Justly, And Love Mercy

She is good at this. That is not false modesty and it is not a boast, it is just true, and it is what makes the last six months uncomfortable.

She can take a subject apart in front of a room. She has done it at work, twice, on things that mattered and where somebody needed to and nobody else was going to. She writes well. People send her things and ask what she thinks, and what she thinks is usually right and is always well put.

And she has believed every word of it. There is no cynicism in her about any of this. She is not performing.

What happened in March is that she was asked, by somebody who admires her and meant it as a compliment, what she was working on at the moment.

And she heard herself list four things she had written and two things she had said.

That is what she is working on. Six months of it, and she went home and tried to think of the last afternoon that any of it had taken off her calendar. Not money, she gives. Not attention, she pays attention. An afternoon. Hours. Her actual body somewhere inconvenient with somebody in front of her.

She got back to 2021 and then she stopped looking.

If your convictions have stopped touching your week, come and sit down. Nothing you believe is going to be argued with in here.

Three verbs, and the third one holds the other two down

Micah asks the question everybody in that century was asking, which was essentially: what does God actually want, and how much of it, and in what quantity.

And the answer is famously short.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

Do justly. Not think justly, not speak justly, not hold a correct and defensible position on justice. Do. It is a verb about conduct and the whole prophetic tradition behind it is about weights and measures and wages and courts, which are all things you handle rather than things you have views on.

Love mercy. Not administer it. Love it, which is what you do to a thing you are near and not a thing you approve of at distance.

And then walk humbly with thy God, which is the one that keeps the first two honest. Because doing justice is enormously available to vanity. It is the most flattering of all the good works, it makes you the reasonable person in the room, and it can be performed at length by somebody who has not been inconvenienced in three years.

Humility is what stops the first two verbs from turning into a costume. It is not an extra requirement stacked on top. It is the mounting.

You have all three of these already available to you, and the third one is already the correction rather than another demand. Micah 6:8 is where that sits, in a sentence where the third clause governs the first two, and the same Spirit who moved the prophet to put them in that order is the one who lets a genuinely good woman read it without contempt for herself.

What the six months were actually doing

Let me say the fair thing, because a woman like her will overcorrect within about a day and that would be a waste.

The four things she wrote were not nothing. Words change what people can see, and somebody has to write them, and the two things she said in a room were said because nobody else would and they cost her something socially, and I am not going to reclassify that as vanity because it was not.

Here is the honest description. She has a real conviction that has found a real outlet, and the outlet happens to be one that is entirely made of language, and language expands to fill whatever space you give it. It never says: that is enough of me for this month, go and do something with your hands. It cannot say that. It is not built to.

So there is nothing in the system that would ever have told her. The absence of an afternoon since 2021 was invisible from inside, and it stayed invisible until somebody asked her a friendly question at a party.

You are not being told your convictions are fraudulent, and they were never once fraudulent. That sentence belongs to James 1:22, where the instruction is to be doers of the word and not hearers only, and His Spirit does not call a woman a hypocrite for having a gift that fills its own container.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, this outranks everything above.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one here.

And notice, again, that Micah's answer to the question about what God requires is three verbs about how you treat people, with nothing in it about anybody's body. A woman eating three meals today can do the whole of Micah 6:8.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside this, and you were never on the outside of it because of what your body needs. It is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12, where God receives according to what a person actually has, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a woman who is already carrying a great deal.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.