i got a call one day that our church was buying some property, it needed surveying, and part of the special deal with the surveyor was that some of the young men would come and help mark the property lines. i wondered why we needed to survey the land considering the county already had a plat defining the boundaries, and in case you didn’t know, a platt is a map, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. And yes, the paperwork on file actually said “platt” which is old English for our spelling today of “plat”. Old English? Say what?? i soon found out that the last person to own the property was one family, who had owned it for 140 years, and before that the only other name on the deed was … the King of England. Oh. Yea, i’d certainly agree the property needed to be re-surveyed considering the plat on file at the court house was still in Old English, with the corners shown as “the big tree down by the creek”, and “at the turn in the creek past the mill”, which by today’s standards, wouldn’t, by any means, hold up as a good definition of property boundaries.
It was hot, the brush and trees were so thick we had to machete our way through the woods. There were black berry canes as thick as a man’s wrist and way over our heads with 1” thorns to match, not to mention the terrifying ground hornets nest big as a large watermelon, a wide variety of blood sucking insects, and the occasional snake. It was quite the adventure!
As we worked all day i would occasionally hear the surveyor steady calling loudly to someone far away who was holding a string, and a plumb bob over a small stake in the ground. He’d say “Left! Left! Hold! Right! Hold!” Then he would yell loudly, “HUP!” When he yelled, “HUP!”, which sounded like a dog bark, the person with the string and plumb bob was supposed to let the plumb bob down to the top of the stake and drive a small nail right where the point touched. Ugh. So tedious! Being curious, i asked the man why was he being so very precise. His answer was … that if we were off by 1/16th of an inch at the zero point, which is where he had the transit and tripod, by the time we got out 400 yards or more, what was originally a 1/16th of an inch error would be several feet wrong.
Well, that set me thinking. How often in my life do i fudge a little at my zero point and then wonder, months or years later, how life got so… off.. center? The problem isn’t so much being off center, God can easily remedy that, the problem is more that i am willing to cheat and lie a little back here in order to get what i want, not need, but want, while taking no thought of the long game and it’s results at a distance, there. Most of the time, the cheating and lying was within myself about my own thinking and eventually, my actions. i would tell myself, “i’m not actually hurting anyone”, until the Lord asked me straight up, “What is your idea of “hurt”, who is “anyone”, and aren’t you a somebody?”
Dishonesty is dishonesty, and cheating is cheating regardless of whether it’s 1/16th of an inch or 400 yards. Yes, of course, the Lord forgives us our sins, but He also insists on us doing something about our thinking which gets us stumbling around to begin with. More than a few people say if they saw a nickel on your table they wouldn’t feel bad if they put it in their pocket, but they would never pocket a $10 dollar bill from the same table. So, let me see if i’ve got this right, you’d steal a nickel but you wouldn’t steal $10. We’ve established that it’s still stealing whether it’s a nickel or a $10 bill. Regardless of the denomination, there still exists a morals and ethics issue at heart.
Being honest means being honest, Proverbs 22:21, “be honest and speak the truth“, not cheating, Leviticus 19:13, “‘You shall not cheat your neighbor“,
or lying, Colossians 3:9, “Lie not one to another…”. Not to God, to yourself nor your neighbor. If we are willing to fudge stuff at our zero point, it is highly likely that months, or even years out, our error is staggering. We might say to ourselves, “Oh, it’s just a little bit.” Is it really? Think about that. The entire root idea of honesty means to bring something into being with the consequence that its existence is a certainty. When someone says “Trust me”, they are asking us to take what they say as the truth and a certainty. How many of us constantly play at the edge of this, stealing a nickel, but not, outright, stealing the $10 spot? How about when we tell ourselves we NEED that new car, but the truth is, truly, we only want it really bad, because i WANT it? We’re willing to go into serious debt to get it, and we lie to ourselves saying our “want” is now justified to being a need. Don’t get me wrong here, there’s nothing wrong with “want”… so long as we’re not willing to become “compromised” in order to accomplish it. The problem isn’t the want or desire, the problem is object of that want or desire.
Or how about changing the tense of our words so the other person thinks a problem isn’t in the “recent now” but actually, only happened long ago and the issues have been resolved. We say, “trust me, it’s the truth”, when really it’s not the truth, we are being manipulative. The error isn’t out at the 400 yard mark, the problem is at our zero point. Jesus said in Luke 6:45, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”