Balanced and Not Wanting
Some things must be done, like it or not. One of them is balancing the checkbook. For as long as I can remember, numbers have been my nemesis. Reporting church attendance to headquarters for a given Sunday, for example, had to be done, it seemed, for the lowest attendance day of the year. When I tried to diet, scales fluctuated up and down like Amex stocks. So, my attempts to square the checkbook balance with the bank statement were not usually happy ones. I faced the ordeal with fear and trembling, anxious, in my “Great Depression” conscience, that errors would lead to dreaded overdrafts.
Stacked before me was a backlog of six months of unfinished business. The ominous task was eased somewhat by confirming with the bank that we still had some money in the account. I set about the task like any responsible citizen would do. I arranged the checks in order and double-checked withdrawals, bankdrafts, and deposits. I listed the checks not yet received by the bank and squared the deposits.
Now, make the calculations: list the bank balance, subtract the outstanding checks, add outstanding deposits, and see if the bank’s way of viewing things for that month matches ours. Bingo! I hit it to the penny. Don’t tell me there isn’t grace! And miracle of miracles, through varying degrees of sweat, the rest of the six months came out the same way. Exact! Precise! On the button! Call it what you want, it was a releasing revelation-maybe not as great as Paul’s man who was “caught up to the third heaven,” but a minor apocalypse, nonetheless, which changed my relationship with numbers from phobia to friendship.
Being somewhat of a head-in-the-clouds person I have not tended to look at life in quantitative terms. I am much more at home with ambiguity, contradiction, and mystery. I enjoy open questions that beg for something more than pat answers. Faith is more inductive than a fiat pronouncement. Getting lost in a novel that doesn’t unravel the plot until the unpredictable end is an experience of ecstasy. God always seems to happen to me when my back is turned.
Now I can’t say that I will ever fall in love with numbers, but the facticity of these creatures now liberates me. There is a “rightness” about the way things add up that can’t be ignored. Even Jesus had to tell his disciples how and where to fish. Don’t put his instruction all down to a miraculous spell. He must have known something about methodology. A golf ball on the tee will only slice, top, or shank because we make the clubhead meet it that way. My balanced checkbook revelation made me discover that some things only work one way and the secret is to find that way.
I still love the quest of the unknown and feel free to say, “I don’t know” but I have increasing reverence for the unequivocal “how to.”