The Four Hardest Words
There’s a question you haven’t asked anybody, and the reason isn’t that you can’t find the answer.
“Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22, ESV)
Proverbs says that so plainly it’s almost boring. Get counsel. Bring people in. The wise ones ask, and the fools are the ones certain they can work it out alone. There’s a whole book of the Bible built on the idea and most of us can quote some version of it. And then we go sit for ten years on something a single conversation would have solved.
I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count. Somebody carries a thing for a decade that a person one phone call away could have untangled in twenty minutes. Not because the help was hidden. Because calling meant saying four words out loud.
I don’t understand this.
After twenty years of being the one people come to, those can feel like the hardest four words in the language.
That’s the real barrier. We usually talk about this like it’s a scheduling problem, and it isn’t. It’s a pride problem wearing the mask of a busy calendar, and if you go one layer under the pride, it’s usually shame. Somewhere along the way you decided a person in your position ought to know this by now, and every year you don’t ask, the admission gets a little more expensive. So the not-knowing compounds quietly, and the asking gets harder, and eventually the whole thing calcifies into something you’ve simply decided is permanent.
It isn’t permanent. It’s just unasked.
Proverbs doesn’t say plans fail without information, either. You have information. We all have more of it than any generation in history and it hasn’t made us wiser. It says plans fail without counsel, and counsel is a person, not a search result.
There’s a reason God built it that way. A person can see the thing you’re too close to see. A person asks the second question, the one you’d never have thought to ask yourself. A person notices the assumption you’ve been standing on so long you stopped noticing it was an assumption. No amount of reading gives you that, because reading can’t look back at you.
This is hardest on the people whose whole job is helping everybody else.
You are allowed to be helped. God didn’t build you to need nothing, and he isn’t impressed when you act like he did. The way his care usually reaches somebody isn’t a bolt from heaven. It’s people. A spouse willing to ask the hard question at the kitchen table. A friend a few steps ahead of you. Somebody who actually knows the ground you’re standing on. Letting yourself be helped mostly means letting one of them in.
So who is it? Not a category but a name. There’s probably a specific person you’ve thought of twice while reading this, and a specific reason you haven’t called them. Maybe it’s the question itself. Maybe it’s that they’d see something you’re not ready to have seen.
Call them anyway. The conversation you’re dreading is almost never the conversation you get. What you brace for is judgment. What comes back, nearly every time, is something ordinary. Me too. Or is that all. Or of course, let’s look at it together. The thing you were certain would change how someone sees you turns out to be the most common thing in the world, and you were the only one carrying it in the dark.
That’s what counsel does. It doesn’t just solve the problem. It ends the isolation the problem was living in.
One call this week. That’s the whole assignment.
A Prayer for Today
Lord, you know the question I haven’t asked and the name I keep not calling. Take the shame off of it. Give me the humility to say I don’t understand this, and let me find on the other side of it the help you’ve had waiting the whole time. Amen.
