He Got Away With It And Nothing Happened

There is a thing that happens at work that does more damage to a decent person than almost anything else, and it is not something that happens to them.

It is something they watch.

Picture the man watching it. Somebody in his department cut a corner. Not a small one. He signed something off that had not been checked, on a job where checking it was the entire point, and he did it because checking it would have taken four days he did not want to spend.

Nothing went wrong. That is the crucial part. The job was fine. The client was pleased. The department came in ahead of schedule.

And the man who did it was praised for it in front of everybody, and mentioned in a report, and is now doing rather well.

And the man watching has done that job properly for nineteen years. Four days every time. Every single one.

And here is what has started in him, and he is not proud of it and cannot say it to anybody. He has started to wonder whether the nineteen years were for nothing.

Not in a dramatic way. It arrives as arithmetic. Four days, times perhaps two hundred jobs, is a very large amount of his one life spent on a thing that turns out to be optional.

And underneath that there is something worse, which is that he has begun to watch that man with a kind of hunger, waiting for it to go wrong, and he does not like what that is doing to him.

The psalm that admits it

There is a psalm entirely about this, and the remarkable thing is how honestly it starts.

For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. (Psalm 73:3, King James Version)

I was envious.

He does not dress it up. He does not say he was troubled by an injustice, which would be the respectable version. He says envious, which is an ugly word, and he uses it about himself in a song that was then sung publicly.

And a few verses later he says his feet had almost slipped, which is an admission that this nearly took him out.

You are not the first person to be nearly taken out by watching somebody prosper, and Psalm 73 opens with a man admitting envy in a public song (Psalm 73:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that admission in the collection instead of tidying it.

And the psalm spends about ten verses describing how well the other people are doing, in detail, with something close to bitterness. It does not rush to the resolution.

You have been given room to say the whole of it, and Psalm 73 spends ten verses on the complaint before it moves anywhere (Psalm 73:3), and the Spirit of God is the one who does not hurry somebody through the part where it still hurts.

Until

There is one word in that psalm where the whole thing turns, and it is not an argument.

Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end. (Psalm 73:17)

Until I went in.

Nothing was explained to him. Nobody proved that the wicked would be punished on a timetable he could verify. He went somewhere, into the presence of God, and his perspective changed there rather than being changed by information.

That matters here, because the man in the yard has been trying to argue himself out of this for months and it has not worked, because it is not an argument problem.

You are not going to be argued out of this, and Psalm 73 turns on going somewhere rather than on being given an explanation (Psalm 73:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who does what a reasoned case has failed to do for months.

And the end of that psalm is the part worth having, because it is not about the other people at all.

Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand. (Psalm 73:23)

Nevertheless I am continually with thee. He does not end up with a verdict about the prosperous. He ends up with a hand.

You are held by the hand rather than handed a ruling about anybody else, and Psalm 73:23 ends with being held rather than with an accounting (Psalm 73:23), and the Spirit of God is the one who is that presence in a yard at the end of a long day.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could go somewhere unhelpful.

This is not saying the nineteen years were wasted. They were not, and the job that was signed off unchecked was still signed off unchecked, and one job going fine does not mean the checking was pointless.

It is also not saying he should report the man. That is a decision with real consequences that only he can see, and no article should be making it for him.

And it is not promising that it catches up with anybody. Sometimes it does not, in this life, visibly, and Psalm 73 does not pretend otherwise.

And plainly: if watching this has gone past work, if the waiting for it to go wrong has become the thing you think about, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is bigger than a department. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in carrying that alone.

You are not being handed a promise about anybody else's outcome, and Psalm 73 ends with a hand rather than with a judgment (Psalm 73:23), and the Holy Spirit is the one who can settle a man without settling a score.