I Always Ask The Hardest One First

You do it every time and you have never asked yourself why.

There are four people in this house you could invite. One of them would say yes tonight without even looking up. One would say yes if it were framed right. One is a maybe.

And one of them will say no, and you go to that one first, every single time.

You would tell somebody it is because he is the one who needs it most, and there is a version of that which is true, and it is not the reason.

Here is the reason, and you can check it against yourself in about four seconds.

A yes from the easy one does not count. It would not settle anything. He comes to everything, he would come to a paint drying, and getting him out of the door proves nothing about whether this family is all right.

A yes from the hard one would prove it. That is the transaction you keep trying to make. If the one who never comes came, then something would be confirmed, and you could stop wondering.

So every evening you take the whole of your hope for this household, and you stake it on the single least likely outcome available to you, and then you lose, and then you do not ask anybody else.

And here is what that costs, and it is the thing I actually want you to see.

The easy one has been standing there the whole time.

In the morning sow thy seed

There is an instruction at the end of Ecclesiastes about where to put your effort when you cannot see results, and it is unusually practical.

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. (Ecclesiastes 11:6, King James Version)

In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening do not withhold your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether they will both be alike good.

The whole verse is built on one admission. You do not know which one will take.

You have been sowing in one place because you decided in advance where the harvest is, and Ecclesiastes 11:6 has never once granted anybody that knowledge. The verse says thou knowest not whether shall prosper, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows which of your children is closest to coming out of that door.

You are able to feel how much freedom that gives, once the responsibility for guessing is taken off you.

The instruction is to sow twice, in the morning and in the evening, in both places, precisely because the sower cannot tell. It is not a strategy for maximizing yield. It is an instruction for people who are working blind, which is every parent who ever lived.

And the last clause is the generous one. Or whether they both shall be alike good. It admits the possibility that everything you throw takes, which is a thing you have stopped considering.

You are permitted to scatter rather than to aim, and casting wide has never once been a lower form of faith than picking the hard target. The Spirit of God is the one who brings up what a person could not have predicted, and Ecclesiastes 11:6 commands the sowing in both places because the outcome is not ours to see.

What the easy yes is worth

Here is what I want to correct, and it is a valuation error rather than a moral one.

You have decided the easy yes is worth nothing. It is worth everything, and here is why.

You have a child in this house who says yes immediately, and Ecclesiastes 11:6 has never once described a willing seedbed as an inferior one. It is written to sow in the morning and in the evening without knowing which will prosper, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the growing in whichever one takes.

Consider what actually happens in a household. Nobody joins a thing that is not happening. The hard one is not refusing an activity; he is refusing an idea, because at the moment that is all it is.

The moment you and the easy one are out there three evenings a week, doing it, visibly, without any reference to him, it stops being an idea and becomes a fact about this family. And a fact is a completely different thing to decline.

Every household habit in history was built by whoever was willing, in front of whoever was not.

And there is a second cost, which is heavier. The one who says yes has been saying yes for a year to a father who keeps asking somebody else first, and he has noticed, and he has said nothing about it, because a child who is easy is very often a child who does not make demands.

You have somebody who has been waiting to be asked first, and being the easy one has never once meant a child does not mind being second. Ecclesiastes 11:6 treats both sowings as worth the effort, and the Spirit of God is the one who sees the child nobody had to persuade.

Ask the easy one, and do not ask the other at all

So here is the assignment, and the second half of it is a discipline.

Ask the easiest one in the house, go outside with whoever says yes, and do not ask the hard one at all tonight.

You are able to leave somebody unasked for one evening, and not asking has never once been the same as giving up on him. It is written that in the evening thou shalt not withhold thine hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works on a young man who is watching from a window with nothing required of him.

Do not ask him. This is the part you will find difficult, and there is a real reason for it.

As long as you ask him every night, he has to produce a refusal every night, and a person who has said no eleven times is heavily invested in the twelfth. Refusals harden with repetition. Everybody's do.

Stop asking, and there is nothing to defend, and the whole position quietly loses its structure.

And be entirely normal about it. Do not make a point of not asking him, which is the same thing as asking him with extra steps, and a sixteen year old will read it in one second.

You have a household that is watched more closely than you think, and going out with somebody else has never once been the same as excluding anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who does the work in the person who was not invited, and Ecclesiastes 11:6 tells a man to keep sowing without knowing which one takes.