I Decided To Give Nothing At All This Year

You have settled it, and the settling brought a kind of peace with it.

Nothing this year. Not less. Nothing. A clean line rather than a diminished version of the old thing.

And when you say it in your head it sounds strong. It sounds like a man refusing to participate in something ridiculous. It sounds like dignity, and there is a version of that argument that is genuinely good, and you have rehearsed the good version several times.

But there is a second sentence underneath it that you do not say, and it is the actual one.

If nothing arrives, nobody gets to look at what arrived.

That is a different motive entirely from dignity. That is a man arranging things so that he cannot be seen, and there is a proverb in Ecclesiastes about exactly the mechanism.

Before we go any further: nothing in this article is a promise about your year, your money, or what comes back to you. Not one word. That trade is not made on this site and it will not be made here.

He that observeth the wind

Here it is.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. (Ecclesiastes 11:4, King James Version)

It is a farming picture and it is not about farming.

A man stands at the edge of a field. The wind is not quite right. He looks at it, and he thinks about it, and he is not being foolish, because wind genuinely does matter and everything he is thinking is technically correct.

And he does not sow. And there is nothing wrong with any one of his reasons, and the field stays empty.

You have been standing at the edge of a field with a set of correct reasons, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that observation in the book. Ecclesiastes 11:4 describes a man doing exactly that and getting nothing done, and He put it there without calling the man stupid.

Now look at the specific trap in it.

The wind watcher is not lazy and he is not a coward. He is being careful. His judgment is good. The conditions really are imperfect and he really can see it, and the whole trouble is that conditions are always imperfect and there is always something to observe.

You are being careful rather than being difficult, and it is written that the man who observes the wind does not sow rather than that he is a bad man. The Spirit of God is the one who diagnoses without accusing, and this is a diagnosis rather than a charge.

And here is the part the verse leaves you to work out.

Waiting for the conditions to justify the action is a strategy that never terminates. There is no year in which the conditions arrive. The wind watcher does not eventually sow in better weather. He becomes a man who does not sow.

You have been running a strategy that has no ending in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man where a road actually goes. The written word names the outcome plainly rather than leaving it open, and He shows it early enough to turn.

Nothing is not a neutral thing to send

Now let me say the part about the room, because the plan assumes something that is not true.

The plan assumes that nothing is invisible. That an absence is a blank. That if you send nothing, no information reaches anybody.

But an absence is one of the loudest things a person can put into a room. It gets noticed and it gets interpreted, and you will not be there to supply the interpretation.

You have been assuming a silence says nothing, and it is written that the man watching the sky ends with an empty field rather than with no field at all. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a man what his absence sounds like from the other side of the room.

And what will they conclude. Not what you intend, which is a principled stand against excess.

Some of them will decide the friendship changed. Some will decide they did something. One or two will suspect the true reason and feel bad for having put you in a position where it came to that.

You are sending a message you did not write, and the Holy Spirit is the one who prevents an unintended sentence from being sent. His word puts the whole loss on the side of the man who never acted rather than on the weather, and He does it by getting a man to send an intended one instead.

And here is the honest part about dignity, said without any accusation in it.

Dignity is a real thing and there is a real version of what you are describing. A man is allowed to step out of an arms race. But the test of whether it is dignity is simple: dignity is quiet and it does not need to avoid anybody.

You are able to tell the difference in about ten seconds, and it is written that the man who regards the clouds is the one left with nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a man look at his own motive without flinching, and looking at it is most of the cure.

Give the small thing

So here is what to do, and it is the smallest possible correction rather than a reversal.

Give one small thing to one person. Not the whole list. One.

Choose it because it suits them, keep it well within what is actually there, and do not spend one minute of thought on how it compares to anything.

You are able to sow in this wind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man to move while the weather is still wrong. Ecclesiastes 11:4 puts the failure in the observing rather than in the conditions, and the weather is always still wrong.

And hand it over with nothing attached. This is the part that will be hardest for you specifically.

No framing. No wry remark about the year. No it is not much, no small speech about how you nearly did not bother. Every one of those is the wind watcher explaining himself at the edge of the field.

You have permission to say nothing at all about it, and Scripture never once has the man justify his weather. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an explanation out of a man's mouth, and the explanation was the whole cost of doing this.

And do not wait for the feeling to agree with the decision.

It will feel like a climb down. It will feel like the clean line was better. That feeling arrives on the way to the door and it is the same voice that produced the clean line in the first place.

You are not obliged to feel good about it, and it is written that the sowing happens while the wind is still being watched by somebody. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man's hands before his feelings have signed anything.