The Egg Count Was Off By Four

I do the eggs. It is my job and it has been my job since I was seven and it is not a hard job, and the whole of it is that you go round the boxes and you bring them in and you say the number.

There were eighteen. I know there were eighteen because I counted them twice on the way across the yard, which I do, because getting the number wrong is the only way to be bad at this job.

I came in and Mrs. Ames was in our kitchen. She is in our kitchen a fair amount and it is always fine, and she was in the middle of telling my dad a long thing about her sister, and I stood there with the basket and Dad said, without turning round, twenty two?

He said twenty two because it had been twenty two on the Tuesday and because he was listening to Mrs. Ames.

And I said yes.

I said yes because Mrs. Ames was mid sentence and because saying eighteen would have meant Dad turning round and the sentence stopping and everybody looking at a basket. It was not about the eggs. It was never about the eggs. It was about four seconds of a room being about me.

Then he wrote twenty two in the book, which is a real book that the count goes in, and I watched him write it.

I did not say anything for two days. On the Thursday I told him and he got the book out and changed it and did not say much about it, and then he asked me, in an interested voice rather than a cross one, what I thought I would have had to do if Mrs. Ames had not been there.

I said I would have just said eighteen.

And he said, right, and that was the end of it, and Bucky came in through the door at that exact moment and put his head in the empty basket, which he does, and everybody laughed and the whole thing was over.

But I have thought about the question. Because the honest answer is that the number was the same either way and the only thing that changed was who was in the room.

The instruction is built out of a coat already off

Paul gives an instruction about lying and gives it a reason that is not a reason anybody expects.

Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him. (Colossians 3:9, 10)

The reason is seeing that ye have put off. Past tense. Already done. He is not telling people to stop lying in order to become somebody, he is telling them that they already are somebody and the lying is a garment that belongs to a person they are no longer.

That is a completely different instruction from the one people usually hear. It is not try harder. It is take off the coat, because the coat is not yours and you have a different one on.

You are wearing something already, and Colossians 3:10 says the new one is on rather than on order. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as identity instead of as an instruction to improve.

There is a thing children are never told and it makes small lies much easier to understand. Most of them are not about the fact. They are about the four seconds after the correction, and the four seconds after the correction is a room, not a number.

You have not been asked to be brave about a fact, and the passage puts the whole matter in what you are wearing. The written word says put off and put on, and His Spirit is what makes that arrive as a change of clothes rather than as a test of nerve.

What is being renewed, and how

The next phrase is the one that explains why this takes any time at all.

Which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him. (Colossians 3:10)

Renewed in knowledge. The renewing happens through knowing rather than through effort, which means the process is more like finding out than like straining.

And what is being renewed toward is an image. Not a standard. The person is being made to look like somebody, and looking like somebody is a thing that happens over time and mostly without a person noticing.

You are being renewed by finding things out rather than by trying harder. Colossians 3:10 puts knowledge in the middle of the renewing, and the Spirit of God is what makes that read as relief for anybody who has been straining.

And a few verses later the whole thing gets one instruction that covers all of it: and let the peace of God rule in your hearts. Rule, as in decide. As in the thing that settles it when there is a question in a kitchen.

You have been given something to decide by that is not the size of the room. Colossians 3:15 makes peace the umpire, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a verse into a boy holding a basket.