I Fixed It and I Did Not Tell Anybody

The latch on the middle gate had been dropping about a quarter of an inch short for months and I fixed it with a screwdriver in about four minutes.

It was not a hard job. I want to say that before anything else because I am not claiming anything. The keep had worked loose and the whole thing needed to come down a quarter inch, and there are two screws, and I have watched my dad do exactly that on other gates about eleven times.

I did it on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody was about.

And then I did not tell anybody, and I did not plan that either. I came in for supper with the intention of mentioning it and I did not mention it, and I have thought about why and the honest answer is that I wanted to see what it was like.

It was like this.

Day one was easy and quite exciting. Day two I nearly said it twice. Day four Dad went through that gate while I was there and it latched properly and he did not notice, because a gate latching properly is not a thing anybody notices, and I had a strange half second where I was almost annoyed and then found the whole thing extremely funny.

Day seven I stopped thinking about it.

Day eleven Bucky spent about four minutes working on that gate the way he does, which he had not bothered to do since it was broken because he had not needed to, and it held, and he gave up and went away, and I was standing at the end of the yard and nobody else saw any of it.

That was the good bit. That was much better than telling anybody would have been and I did not expect that at all.

I have still not told anybody and it has been about seven months, and I am not writing this down so that people find out, I am writing it down because I think the thing I found out is worth passing on.

Nobody knowing does not make a thing smaller. It makes it a different shape, and the shape is heavier at the start and lighter later, and I would not have believed that if somebody had told me.

The eyes are in every place

The proverb is one line and the geography in it is total.

The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. (Proverbs 15:3)

In every place. Not most places, not the important ones, and the sentence gives no exceptions and no locations where the coverage thins out.

And the object of the beholding is given as two things, and people usually only hear the first. Beholding the evil, which is the reading that makes a person nervous, and beholding the good, which is in the same clause and gets skipped constantly.

You are inside a coverage that includes the good as explicitly as it includes anything else, and Proverbs 15:3 names both in one line. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as warmth instead of as surveillance.

That matters enormously for a child, and honestly for everybody, because a verse about God seeing everything is heard as a warning by about nine people in ten, and half the sentence is about Him seeing the good things nobody else did.

You have not been watched only for the bad half. The written word puts good and evil in the same clause with the same verb, and His Spirit is what makes that balance land in somebody who has always heard the verse the other way.

What He does about the hidden things

There is a promise in the same passage of Matthew about what happens to things done in secret, and the verb at the end is not the one anybody expects.

That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:4)

Himself. That word is in there and it is doing something. It is not that a reward arrives from a system. The one doing it is named, personally, in the middle of a sentence about secrecy.

And the thing about carrying something nobody knows is not really about the reward at all, it is about whether it existed. A person who has done a good thing with no witness has a quiet suspicion that it may not have fully happened, and that verse answers exactly that.

You are holding something that fully happened, and Matthew 6:4 has the Father Himself as the one who saw it. The Spirit of God is what makes that settle the question rather than merely comfort it.

You have not been left holding an unconfirmed thing. Proverbs 15:3 and Matthew 6:4 between them put a witness in every place and name Him personally, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from two verses into a boy standing at the end of a yard.