Both Ditches Are on the Same Road
There are two ways to get a thing wrong, and only one of them looks like a mistake.
“The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.” (Proverbs 21:5, ESV)
We read that and picture one kind of person. The gambler. The one who moves too fast, doesn’t count the cost, chases the thing that’s finally going to get him ahead. Hasty. We all know that guy, and some of us have been him.
The part we skip is what the proverb holds up as the alternative. It isn’t caution. It isn’t carefulness, or playing it safe, or waiting until you’re sure. The word is diligent, and diligent is a working word. It plans, and then it moves. It gets something in the ground.
The opposite of hasty isn’t frozen. The opposite of hasty is faithful and steady.
Which means there are two ways to end up with nothing, and the second one is a good deal more respectable than the first. One man throws it away. The other refuses to touch it. And they end up in the same place, standing over the same undisturbed patch of dirt, having produced nothing at all. One of them says he was reckless. The other says he was being careful. The field doesn’t know the difference. Nothing came up either way.
Most people reading this are the second man. Very few of us lie awake worried we’re being too cautious. Caution never announces itself as a problem. It shows up as being thorough. Being responsible. Wanting to understand it a little better first, wanting to wait until things settle down. It looks like wisdom from the outside, and from the inside it feels like the adult thing to do.
The test I’ve had to learn to run on myself is a simple one. Real preparation has a finish line. You gather what you need, and then you act. If the gathering never ends, if there’s always one more thing to learn before you could possibly begin, then somewhere back there it stopped being preparation and turned into a place to hide.
The one who moved too fast usually knows it. He can tell you the month it happened. The one who never moved at all has a harder time seeing it, because nothing dramatic ever occurred. There’s no story to tell. There’s just a long stretch of years where the thing he meant to do sat exactly where he left it, and the not-doing never once felt like a decision. But it was one. Standing still is a choice you make every morning without noticing you made it.
The good news is that this proverb doesn’t ask you to become a different person. It asks for a plan and a step. Diligent doesn’t mean fearless and it doesn’t mean fast. It means you decided, and then you did the next small thing, and then you did it again. That’s the whole difference between the two ditches.
So before you go on with your day, name your ditch. Be honest about which one is actually yours. Are you the one who rushes, about to move fast on something you haven’t counted the cost of? Or are you the one who freezes, calling avoidance caution, letting a fear you’ve never actually named keep you from ever starting? Some of us are one. A few of us are both, in different corners of our lives.
You can’t climb out of a hole you won’t admit you’re standing in.
A Prayer for Today
Lord, you know which ditch is mine. Give me the honesty to name it out loud and the courage to take one steady step out of it. Not a leap, and not another year of waiting. Just the next faithful thing. Amen.
