A Standard Nobody Could Meet

You could list it. That is the strange part; if somebody asked you what you are trying to be, you could produce it in about a minute.

Patient like the man who runs the thing on Wednesdays. Generous like your uncle, who does it without anybody knowing. As disciplined about the early mornings as the woman who writes the study notes. As good with your children as your neighbor, who is somehow never in a hurry.

Able to say the difficult thing kindly, like somebody you worked with once.

Prayerful like a man you heard about, whose habits you have adopted twice and abandoned twice.

That is six of about forty.

And the thing you have never once done is put the list side by side and notice what it is.

It is not a person. It is a composite, assembled over twenty years out of the single best quality of forty different people, most of whom are not good at the other thirty-nine things and several of whom you know to have serious difficulties in areas you have not included.

You have been measuring yourself, daily, against a man who has never existed.

What this page will not do

This is the last category and it has one rule: nothing gets added. So there is no new standard here, no shorter list, and no framework to replace the one you have been carrying. Scripture stands under that in Micah 6:8, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

I am not going to tell you the forty are wrong to admire. They are not. Every one of those qualities is real and worth having and you have not invented any of them. It is written, in Micah 6:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

I am not going to tell you to lower your standards, which is what people say and which is not the problem. Your standards are not too high; they are too many, and they belong to too many different people.

And I am not going to give you a way to work on them one at a time, because that would be adding a project to a man who is already carrying forty.

You are not failing at something achievable. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not calibrated to anybody's performance against a composite, and the Holy Spirit is in that hall with a man stacking chairs and running a list.

The verse is famous for being short

There is a line in Micah that is quoted constantly, and what is worth noticing about it is not what it contains but how little.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

Three things.

Not thirty. Not a list with sub-points and a maintenance schedule. Three, and the passage before it is a man frantically offering more and more, thousands of rams and rivers of oil, and this is the answer to that offering.

The context matters here more than usual. Micah 6 is somebody escalating, proposing greater and greater quantities of religious effort, and the reply is a reduction. It is not a call to try harder in three areas rather than forty. It is a shortening.

Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with thy God.

Every one of them is a direction rather than a standard. None of them has a threshold in it. There is no version of that verse in which a man could work out whether he had done enough today, which is exactly what a composite of forty people is for.

You are not required to meet a specification. Scripture says what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God, Micah 6:8, and the answer comes as a reduction to three directions rather than as a fuller list, and the Holy Spirit has never once issued the specification you have been working from.

Where the composite came from

It came from paying attention, which is a good habit, applied without a limit, which is what has cost you.

You notice the best thing about people. That is genuinely admirable and it is why people like being around you. And every time you noticed one, over twenty years, it went quietly into the file, and nothing was ever taken out.

Nobody adds to a standard deliberately. It accretes.

And there is a second thing, which is why it has never collapsed under its own weight. You have never seen the whole list at once. It only ever presents one item at a time, at the moment you are failing that particular one, and each individual item is entirely reasonable. Scripture settles that in Micah 6:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

That is why it has survived twenty years of a thoughtful man's attention.

You are not being measured that way by God. Scripture says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, Psalm 103:14, and it is offered as the basis of how He deals with people rather than as a concession, and the Holy Spirit has never once compared you to an assembly of other people's strongest points.

What is put down

The composite. That is the whole of what this page asks and there is nothing after it.

Not the qualities; you are not being asked to stop admiring your uncle or to be less patient. Those are not the weight. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Micah 6:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

The weight is the assembled man. The one who is all forty at once, whom you have never seen, whom nobody has ever met, and against whom you have measured every day for twenty years. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Micah 6:8, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Say what he is, out loud, once. The man I am trying to be is made of forty people and does not exist.

Then leave it there. Do not replace it with a shorter list; that is the reflex and it would be a forty-first thing.

The three in Micah are not a replacement standard. They are the answer to an escalation, and they are directions rather than measurements, and none of them can be passed or failed on a Tuesday.

You are not being asked to carry a lighter version of the same thing. Scripture says come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, Matthew 11:28, and the rest is given rather than earned by a better system, and the Holy Spirit is not handing anybody a revised specification.