I Have Them On Paper And I Feel Foolish

You have a book. Or a card, or the back of an envelope, or a page in a diary from four years ago.

And it works. That is the thing nobody says. Your system works. You can get into what you need to get into, you have not been locked out of anything important, and when a thing changes you cross it out and write the new one underneath.

And somebody found out about it, and made a face.

That is what this article is actually about. Not the paper. The face. Because until that moment you had a way of coping with something genuinely hard, and afterwards you had a way of coping with something genuinely hard plus a low steady sense of being a bit foolish, and the second one is heavier than the first.

So let me say the plain thing first, before anything else.

You are managing something legitimately difficult. You are being asked to hold a couple of dozen unique strings of nonsense, changed at irregular intervals by organizations who never coordinate with each other, most of which you use rarely, several of which lock you out if you get them wrong three times.

Nobody can hold that in their head. Nobody. The people who look at you sideways about the paper are not holding it in their heads either. They have their own arrangement, and their arrangement is also a coping method, and the only difference is that theirs is fashionable.

I cannot go with these, for I have not proved them

There is a moment before a famous fight where a young man is dressed in the best equipment available and takes it all off again.

And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him. (1 Samuel 17:39, King James Version)

I cannot go with these, for I have not proved them.

The armor was not bad armor. It belonged to the king. It was almost certainly the finest available, and everybody standing there would have agreed that a man going into that situation ought to be wearing it.

And David takes it off, and the reason he gives is not that it was poor equipment. It is that he had not proved it. He had no evidence, in his own hands, that it worked for him.

What he went with instead was the thing he had actually used. A sling. Not the recommended equipment, and I promise you somebody in that camp thought less of him for it.

Being handed the correct method by a confident person is not the same as having something you have proved. And a thing you have proved is not made worse by somebody else's face.

You are entitled to go with what you have proved, and the opinion of the confident has never once been the measure of whether it works. First Samuel 17:39 has a man refuse the best available equipment because he had not tested it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person permission to keep what they have proved.

What is actually true about paper

Let me be plain, because vagueness here would be its own kind of condescension.

Paper is not stupid. A book in your house is not exposed to the entire world the way a thing on a network is, and the risk it carries is a small local risk: that somebody in your home reads it, or it gets lost, or it gets thrown out by accident.

Those are real and they are also manageable, and they are manageable by deciding where the thing lives rather than by changing your whole method.

And I am not going to give you a security lecture, because you did not come here for one and because a lecture is exactly what has been making you feel small. You have been managing this for years without help. What you need is not correction. What you need is for somebody to say that the thing you built is a legitimate arrangement.

It is. Write them down. Cross them out. Write the new one underneath.

You have built something that has held for years, and it has never once needed anybody's approval to be a real method. The written word lets a man go into the hardest moment of his life with the equipment he had tested, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a plain arrangement dignified rather than embarrassing.

Choose where it lives

So here is the assignment, and it is not a change of method.

Put the paper somewhere you have chosen on purpose.

That is all. Not somewhere clever, not somewhere hidden, not somewhere anybody recommended. A place you have decided on, deliberately, and that you will remember because you chose it.

The reason is not security. It is that a thing kept on purpose is different from a thing that drifted. At the moment your book probably lives wherever it ended up, and that is the part that makes it feel makeshift. Choosing where it goes turns the same object into a decision, and the decision is what changes how it feels to use it.

And while you are moving it, that is the whole task. You are not rewriting anything, you are not sorting it, and you are not starting a better one.

First Samuel 17:39 has a man put off the equipment somebody else was confident about, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person stops apologizing for how they cope.

You are able to choose where it lives, and it has never once needed replacing to become deliberate. First Samuel 17:39 lets the proved thing stand against the recommended thing, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody putting their own arrangement in its place.