I Bought The Cheapest One

It came on a Thursday and your neighbor was in her yard.

She asked what you had gotten, and you said a new washer, and she asked which one, and you said something vague. You said it was one of the basic ones. You said something about not needing all the settings.

And all of that was true, and all of it was slightly to one side of the truth, and you knew you were doing it while you did it.

What you did not say is that it is the cheapest one that shop sells. That you stood there and worked out what was in the account and picked the one you could actually pay for, and that there was a moment where you nearly went smaller and there was nothing smaller.

And she was not asking a loaded question. She was making conversation over a fence about a delivery. She has not thought about it since.

You have thought about it four times.

That is the thing this article is about, and it is not the machine.

The machine is fine. It washes clothes. It is louder than the last one and it takes longer and the drum is smaller, and it does the thing a washer does, and in six months you will not think about any of that.

What is not fine is what you have decided the price means about you.

And I want to be exact about what I am not going to do here, because most writing on this subject does one of two things and both of them are useless to you tonight.

I am not going to tell you that a better one is coming.

Not that God will provide a nicer machine, not that this is temporary, not that your situation is about to change. I do not know that, and holding out a better machine would make this one into a waiting room, and you have to do the washing in it for years.

And I am not going to suggest you should have waited and saved.

You had a full basket and no machine. Waiting was not a strategy available to you, and anybody who says otherwise has not stood in that spot.

In whatsoever state I am

There is a line in Philippians about contentment, and the word to notice is learned.

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. (Philippians 4:11, King James Version)

I have learned.

That is a man reporting on a process, not describing a temperament. He is not saying he never minded. He is saying he arrived at this, over time, and the arriving was work.

So if you have not arrived at it about a washing machine on a Thursday, you are not behind. You are in the ordinary place a person is in.

And then: in whatsoever state I am.

Whatsoever state. Not once my circumstances improve. Not in this state as a stage on the way to the next one. The contentment is placed inside the actual present situation, and that situation is not framed as temporary anywhere in the sentence.

That is the part that matters for you, and it is why I will not promise you a better machine. This verse does not work by pointing at a future one. It works by settling a man inside the state he is actually in, and a promise about later would undo the whole thing.

And notice what he does not do. He does not explain his circumstances to anybody. He does not say what he had or did not have, or why, or what he had been through to end up there. He simply says: whatsoever state I am.

There is a whole freedom in that phrase and it is the freedom of not having to give an account.

You are able to be settled inside the state you are actually in, and that has never once required a better one to be coming. Philippians 4:11 puts the contentment in whatsoever state a man is in and never once points at the next one, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing at a fence being vague about a delivery.

The price is not a report on you

Here is the practical half, and it is about what you think that number says.

You have read the price as a summary of your life.

That is what happened at the fence. In that half second you were not thinking about a washer. You were thinking that the price of the machine in your kitchen is a public figure that tells anybody who knows it how your household is doing, and that you would rather it were not known.

But a price is a fact about a machine and about a week. It is what a shop asked for a drum and a motor, and what was in an account on a particular Thursday. It is not a measurement of what you have made of your life, or how hard you have worked, or how well you are managing.

You have been treating a number as a verdict, and it has no such authority. Nobody in your house has ever been evaluated by a receipt.

And here is what the reading costs you, which is the reason I am pressing on it. It does not stay at the fence. It comes into the house. Every time that machine runs, it makes a slightly louder noise than the old one, and every time you hear it you receive the same small message about yourself.

That is a machine you paid for delivering an insult on a schedule, and you have been accepting it for weeks.

It washes the clothes. It is doing exactly what you bought it to do, and it does it as well as the expensive one does, which is the part nobody says out loud about washers.

The price of that machine is a fact about a Thursday, and a number has never once been a report on you. The written word settles a man inside his own state without one word of explanation to anybody, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody hearing an insult in a spin cycle.

Say what you paid, out loud, to one person

So here is the assignment, and it is uncomfortable and it is short.

Say out loud to one person what you paid, without justifying it.

One person you trust. A sister, a friend, the woman you sit next to at church.

Say the actual figure. And then stop talking.

That last part is the entire assignment and it is why this works.

Because you will want to keep going. You will want to add that it was all that was available at short notice. Or that it does the job. Or that you did not want anything fancy. All of those are true and every one of them is a defense, and a defense implies a charge, and there is no charge.

Say the number. Full stop. Let there be a silence if there is one.

And here is what you will find, and it is worth going through the discomfort for. The number will sit there in the air and it will not do anything. Your friend will not think less of you. Nothing about the room will change. And you will have discovered that the figure has no power in it beyond the power you have been giving it in private.

The reason it has felt so heavy is that it has never once been said out loud. Things kept in silence grow, and this one has had weeks.

And when you next talk to your neighbor over the fence, you do not have to tell her anything. This is not an assignment about being open with everybody. It is about one person, once, so that the figure stops being a secret, because it was the secrecy doing the damage rather than the price.

You are able to say the figure and let it sit there, and it has never once needed a defense attached to it. Philippians 4:11 says in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content, without explaining the state to anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a room where a number has just been said out loud.