Know the State of Your Flocks Means Go and Look

There is a line in Proverbs that reads like advice for farmers and is actually about the way people avoid things.

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds.

That is it. Go and know the condition of what you are responsible for. Not own it. Not think about it. Know its state, which means going out to where it is and putting your eyes on it, on purpose, more than once.

And the reason that verse is not obvious is that everybody assumes a person automatically knows the condition of their own stuff. They do not. A man can own a flock for years and not know how many are limping, because knowing requires walking out there and counting, and there is always something else to do.

Here is what I have found in my own life. The things I do not look at are never the things I do not care about. They are always the things I care about most and am most afraid of.

Nobody avoids inspecting something they are indifferent to. Avoidance is a fear response, and fear only shows up where something matters.

The verb is the whole instruction

Read it, and notice that the command is not about work. It is about attention.

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. (Proverbs 27:23, King James Version)

Be diligent to know. Look well.

Those are both perception words. He is not telling anybody to work harder, and that is remarkable in a book that talks about work as much as Proverbs does. He is telling them to go and see, accurately and repeatedly, the actual condition of the thing.

Because a person can work extremely hard on a thing they have not looked at in a year, and that is how a whole herd goes bad while somebody is busy.

You are able to look at it, and God has never once required you to fix a thing before you are allowed to see it. That is not me lowering a bar. Proverbs 27:23 commands knowing and not repairing, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person the steadiness to open something they have been walking past.

Why nobody looks

Let me be honest about the mechanics, because the reason people do not look is not laziness.

It is that looking makes it real. As long as a thing is unexamined it exists in a fog, and a fog can be lived with. The moment somebody actually counts, the number becomes a fact, and facts require responses.

So avoidance is not a failure of discipline. It is a strategy, and it works. It keeps a person from having to answer something today.

And here is the cost, which nobody warns you about: the fog is more expensive than the fact. A person carries an unexamined problem constantly, at a low level, in the back of their mind, all day, for years. The examined version takes one honest hour and then sits still.

I do not know a single person who looked at something they had been avoiding and said afterward that it was worse than they had been imagining. Not one.

You have been carrying a fog, and the fact has never once been the heavier of the two. Proverbs 27:23 tells a person to go and know rather than to worry accurately, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes with somebody into the room they have been avoiding.

The next verse is why

Solomon gives the reason immediately, and it is oddly practical for a book of wisdom.

For riches are not for ever: and doth the crown endure to every generation?

He is saying that things move. What was true last year is not automatically true now, and a position that once held is not permanent, and that is exactly why an inspection has to be repeated. Not because a person is careless, but because the condition of everything changes whether anybody is watching or not.

The flocks were fine in the spring. It is not spring.

And then he lists ordinary consequences of paying attention: the hay comes in, the herbs of the mountains gather, the lambs give clothing, the goats pay for the field, and there is enough milk for the household and the maidens. Ordinary provision, downstream of somebody who kept looking.

You have something that has changed since you last checked, and He has never once expected you to know that without going to see. Proverbs 27:24 gives the reason plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who prompts a person toward the specific thing that needs eyes on it.

This is where the power to get gets spent

I want to connect this to the spine, because it is the least glamorous version of it and maybe the truest.

Deuteronomy 8:18 says God gives the power to get. And a lot of what that power gets spent on is not dramatic. It is not a big swing or a bold move. It is going out to the barn on a Saturday when nobody is making you, and counting, and writing down what you find.

That is the actual texture of a built life. Somebody looked, regularly, at the unglamorous thing.

And I will say the honest part: I was bad at this for years and I still lose stretches of it. I did not have a system, I did not want to know, and the reason I write about it now is not that I mastered it. It is that I finally went out to the barn one time and it turned out I had been managing a fog for about three years.

You are able to start this today, and the years of not looking have never once disqualified a person from looking now. Proverbs 27:23 is a repeatable instruction and not a one time examination, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies the willingness on a specific Saturday.