I Built A Spreadsheet For This

There are nine columns.

Sound. Length. How it goes with the last name. Whether anybody in the family already used it. Nicknames it could turn into. How it looks written down. Whether it works on a small child and on an adult. Meaning. And a column called gut, which is scored out of ten like all the others, which should probably have been the first sign.

There is a weighted average at the end. Two of the columns count double.

And the answer that comes out of the bottom of it has changed twice, and neither time did it feel like an answer. It felt like arithmetic.

I want to say something kind about that spreadsheet before I say anything else about it, because people are going to laugh at it and I am not going to.

It is not silly. It is a very reasonable response to a decision with no obvious method. Nobody hands out a method for this. Everything else this size comes with a process: the house had a survey, the job had an interview, even the car had reviews. This one arrives with nothing, and a person who is used to doing things carefully built the missing process out of what was available.

So the spreadsheet is not the problem, and I am not going to tell anybody to delete it.

But I do want to name what it was quietly for, because that part matters.

The columns were not built to find the answer. They were built so that if it goes wrong, the decision can be pointed at instead of the person who made it. A weighted average is not a preference. It is a defense. It is a way of choosing without anybody, including yourself, being the one who chose.

That is worth saying gently, because it comes from somewhere reasonable too. Somebody, somewhere, made a remark once about a choice, and a lesson got learned about being the one holding the decision when the remark lands.

The heart devises and the steps get directed

There is one line in Proverbs that has more to do with a spreadsheet than anything else in Scripture.

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps. (Proverbs 16:9, King James Version)

Read the order of it. The heart devises first. The heart makes the plan, does the thinking, builds the columns if that is what the heart does. That half is not criticized anywhere in the verse. It is simply reported as what people do, without a shadow of disapproval on it.

You are permitted to plan carefully, and Scripture has never once treated a careful person as a faithless one. Proverbs 16:9 lets the heart devise the whole way before the Lord is mentioned at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as permission rather than as a rebuke.

And then the second half, which is the half that changes the weight in the chest. The Lord directs the steps.

Not: the Lord overrides the plan. Not: the plan was arrogant. The steps get directed. Which means the walking is being handled by somebody else while the devising goes on.

You have been carrying two jobs, and the written word only ever gave you one of them. The devising is the reader's, the directing is God's, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a formula who does the second half.

What the spreadsheet was actually for

So here is the practical thing, and it is not about deleting the file.

Look at column nine. The one called gut.

That column is doing something the other eight cannot do, and it has been scored out of ten and weighted at half, which is the most revealing thing on the whole sheet. The one column that could actually answer the question was made to compete with sound and length on a scale it does not live on.

Because a preference is not a score. A preference does not come out of ten. It comes out as: that one, and I do not entirely know why, and I would be sad to lose it.

You are allowed to want one without justifying it in a column, and no verse anywhere requires a reason before a person is permitted a preference. Proverbs 16:9 has the heart devising, and a heart is not a spreadsheet, and it is the Spirit of God who gives somebody back permission to simply want a thing.

The other eight columns are useful. They are genuinely useful, and I want to be clear that I am not making fun of them. Nobody should get to the end of this and think checking how it sits with the last name was a waste of a Tuesday.

But those eight are filters. They rule things out. Not one of them can rule something in, and a filter run over a hundred names produces a shortlist, never a choice, and the search has been stuck at exactly that point for eleven weeks.

You have already done the filtering, and Scripture puts the plan and the direction in two different pairs of hands. Proverbs 16 makes that split without hedging it, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the second pair while a person on the sofa holds the first.

The column you did not put in

There is one thing the sheet does not have a column for, and I would like to name it because it is the thing that will actually settle this.

Not: which name scores highest. But: which name would be a small loss to let go of, and which one would be an actual one.

That is not a scoring question. It is a much simpler one, and it takes about four seconds to answer honestly, and everybody already knows the answer before they finish reading the sentence.

Something rose just then. A row came to mind. That happened faster than any calculation on the sheet, which means the information was never missing. It was only ever unauthorized.

You are not being irrational when something in you rises at one of them, and the written word never once asked a person to distrust that. The Spirit of God is the one who quiets somebody enough to notice what already rose, and Proverbs 16:9 says the heart devises, plainly and without apology.

And here is the part that answers the real fear, the one underneath the columns.

If it goes wrong, the spreadsheet cannot protect anybody, because there is no scenario in which a person turns to a weighted average as a defense. It was never going to work. That protection was imaginary from the first row.

You were never going to be alone with the outcome, and Proverbs 16 promises a directed step and not a defended one. The Holy Spirit is present in the walking, which is a far better protection than a column ever offered.