I Paid For It So I Have To Finish

You are two hundred pages into something you do not like and the sentence in your head is about the money.

Not the story. Not curiosity about how it ends. The sentence is: I paid for this. And under that sentence is a rule that has never been examined, which is that a thing bought has to be used, and using a book means finishing it.

So every evening you pick it up out of an accounting obligation, read nine pages badly, and put it down feeling slightly worse than you did before.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, and no shelf of what a man ought to have read by now. Being handed one has never once opened a book, and mostly it adds one more thing to be behind on.

And nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Being told again by a stranger returns nothing at all.

What I want to look at is the accounting, because there is a real error in it and it is not a moral error.

The money is gone either way. It went the day you bought it, and nothing you do with the next two hundred pages brings any of it back.

A time to keep, and a time to cast away

There is a line in the middle of Ecclesiastes 3 that puts two opposite acts side by side and refuses to rank them.

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. (Ecclesiastes 3:6, King James Version)

Read the pairs.

A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away. Both halves of each pair are given the same standing. Nothing in the verse suggests that keeping is the good one and casting away is the failure state.

That is unusual and it is deliberate. The whole passage is a list of paired opposites, and the point of the list is that both members of each pair belong to a life. Not one preferred and one tolerated. Both, in their time.

You are allowed a time to cast away, and setting something down has never once been the failure half of a pair. Ecclesiastes 3:6 puts casting away beside keeping and ranks neither above the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a book you have not enjoyed since page eighty.

There is something else worth noticing about that chapter.

Not one of the pairs mentions cost. Nothing in the list says a time to keep what you paid for. The verse is about seasons and fitness, and it never once introduces the price of a thing as the deciding factor in whether to hold it.

You have a decision that does not turn on what a thing cost, and a price paid has never once been in the list of reasons to keep something. It is written a time to keep, and a time to cast away, the passage weighs seasons and never once weighs receipts, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

The money left before the reading did

Here is the mechanism, and it is arithmetic rather than character.

The money is not in the book. It left your hands at the register and it is not coming back through the pages.

Sit with that, because the rule in force here assumes otherwise. It assumes that reading the remaining pages recovers some of the cost, and that closing the book forfeits it. Neither is true. The cost is identical in both scenarios: it is spent, fully, either way.

So the only thing actually being decided tonight is how to spend the next four evenings. The money has no vote, because the money has already voted and left.

And there is a second cost that the rule never counts. Four more evenings of reading something you dislike is four evenings not reading something you would like, and those evenings are worth considerably more than the price of a paperback.

You are protecting money that is already gone, and two hundred pages of obligation have never once recovered one dollar of it. Ecclesiastes 3:6 gives a time to cast away without weighing what a thing cost, and the Holy Spirit is present with a man doing arithmetic that cannot come out right.

And there is a layer under that, and it is the honest one.

The rule is not really about money. Money is the respectable form of it. Underneath is something older, about waste, and about not being the kind of man who abandons things he started, and that one is heavier than a paperback and it is what has actually been keeping the book open.

You have permission to leave a thing unfinished without becoming a man who abandons things, and one closed book has never once made a habit of anything. The written word names casting away as a season with its own proper time, and His Spirit is the one who takes an unexamined rule off a man.

Put it down, and start another one

So here is the assignment, and there is no caveat attached to any part of it.

Put down the book that is not working tonight and start another one before you sleep.

Close it. Not at the chapter break, not after twenty more pages to be sure. Where it sits, tonight, and then put it on a shelf somewhere it is not in your eye line.

Nobody here is going to tell you to give it another fifty pages. It might improve. It does not matter. Closing it is allowed and you owe nobody a reason.

Then start something else, tonight, even ten pages of it, before you sleep.

You have a season for setting a thing down, and a price already paid has never once been recoverable through two hundred pages. His Spirit is in that courtyard now, and it is written a time to keep, and a time to cast away, with neither one ranked above the other.

Here is why the second half is not optional.

Closing a book on its own ends the evening on a stop, and a stop is exactly what the rule has trained you to read as waste. Opening something else within the same twenty minutes converts it into a swap, and a swap has no loss in it anywhere.

And ten pages of the new one, so that tomorrow there is something to come back to rather than a decision to make.

You are able to swap a book out tonight without losing anything, and closing one at page two hundred has never once wasted what was already spent. Ecclesiastes 3:6 says a time to keep, and a time to cast away, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a man shutting a book he paid for.

The word waste is going to arrive as you close it. Let it arrive and do not argue. The waste was the four evenings ahead, and you have just recovered those.

You have four evenings back tonight, and the price of a paperback has never once bought anybody's next four evenings. It is written a time to get, and a time to lose, both halves of every pair in that chapter are given equal standing, and the Spirit of God is giving it here.