I Said the Milk Count Was Right

There is a sheet that goes with the milk and a man signs it, and for eleven weeks I signed a sheet that was wrong by about four gallons a week.

It was not my error and I want to say that first, not because it makes any difference but because it is true. The meter had drifted. It read low. I found out it read low in the second week, when I checked it against the churns for a completely unrelated reason, and I stood in that dairy with a pencil for about four minutes and then I signed the sheet.

Four gallons a week in my favor. Not a fortune. Enough to notice at the end of a year and not enough to notice at the end of a week, which is exactly the size of thing that gets kept.

And then it was week three, and I had signed week two. And that is the whole architecture. Once you have signed the second one, correcting the third one is not correcting the third one, it is confessing the second one.

Bucky was in that dairy doorway most mornings while I did it, eating something off the frame, which is the only witness a man deserves for a thing like that. Toby helps with the sheet now that he is nine. He reads the number off the meter and I write it, which was my idea, in the spring, and I did not think it through.

He read a number off that meter in week eleven and he said it out loud in an ordinary voice, and I heard it the way you hear something in your own house that does not belong there.

I went and rang the dairy that afternoon. It took a while to sort out and I paid it back over the winter, and the man who dealt with it was neither shocked nor kind, he was a man doing a job, and honestly that was the best possible way for it to go.

The thing I have not got over is not the money. It is that for nine weeks a nine year old read a number out loud and I wrote a different one down in front of him, and he never said anything about it, and I do not know what he thought and I have never asked.

The reason attached to the command

Paul gives an instruction about lying and then, instead of the reason anybody would predict, he gives a completely different one.

Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. (Ephesians 4:25)

The reason is not that lying is against the rules, which it is. It is not that a person will be found out, which they may not be. The reason given is structural: we are members one of another, which is a claim about a body and about parts of a body.

If a hand reports something false to a shoulder, nobody in that arrangement is being clever. The whole thing moves wrong.

You are joined to people in a way that makes a false number theirs as well as yours. Ephesians 4:25 gives membership as the reason rather than morality, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as belonging instead of as a heavier rule.

That is the thing about a small lie kept over time. It does not sit still in the person who told it. It becomes an object in a room that other people are standing in, and they adjust to it without knowing it is there.

You have not been the only one living inside what you did not correct. The written word puts the reason in the shared body rather than in the individual conscience, and His Spirit is what makes that plain to somebody who thought the whole business was private.

Truth in the middle of a list about growing

That verse does not appear in a chapter about honesty. It appears in a long passage about a body growing up, and the context changes what the instruction is for.

But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, maketh increase of the body. (Ephesians 4:15, 16)

Truth here is a growth mechanism rather than a standard to be met. A body that reports itself accurately grows. A body that does not, does not, and the passage treats that as a matter of engineering rather than of virtue.

You are able to grow at the speed the truth is told, and not faster. Ephesians 4:15 makes truth the condition of increase rather than the price of admission, and the Spirit of God is what makes that read as an opening instead of as a demand.

And the whole section has a phrase in it that has kept a great many people honest: and grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.

You have somebody present in this who is grieved rather than merely disappointed. Ephesians 4:30 names the Holy Spirit as the one who feels it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a warm fact rather than a threatening one.