I Have Written The List Four Times

There is a notebook somewhere in your house, and you know exactly where it is.

In it, four times, in four different pens, is the same plan. Room by room. Times beside each one. Maybe a highlighter came out on the third version, because the third version was going to be the one.

And none of those four lists has ever had a single line crossed off it.

I want to say something about that before we go anywhere else, because I think you have been carrying the wrong story about it. The story you have been carrying is that you are the kind of person who talks and does not do. That story has probably been said to you at some point by somebody who did not know what they were looking at, and it has been said to you a great many more times by you, at night, with the light off.

Here is what I actually think happened. Writing that list was the closest you could get to the room. It was you standing at the edge of something enormous and doing the one thing your hands could still do. It was not avoidance dressed up as effort. It was effort that could not find anywhere to land.

A list is a shape you can put around a thing that has no shape. And when the thing itself is too big to touch, a shape is not nothing.

But a shape is not a cleared surface either, and I think you already know that, which is why the fourth list did not feel good the way the first one did.

Be ye doers of the word

James has a line about this that most people have only ever heard used as a stick.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. (James 1:22, King James Version)

Read who that is aimed at. It is aimed at people who were showing up. They were in the room, they were listening, they were not absent and they were not indifferent. That is who gets this sentence. Not the people who never came.

And the danger James names is not laziness. It is a very specific deception, the one where taking a thing in starts to feel like having done it. He is not shouting at people who cannot be bothered. He is warning people who care a great deal, and who are being robbed by the gap between caring and doing without ever noticing the robbery.

That is a completely different letter than the one you have been reading.

You are not a hearer only because you are lazy, and James has never once used that word about the person he is warning. It is written that the deceiving is self deceiving, which means it happens to sincere people and not to careless ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can walk a sincere person out of it without shaming them on the way.

You have been trying to reach the room with a pen because the pen was the only tool your hands could lift. James 1:22 puts the doing and the hearing side by side without ever calling the hearer worthless, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person from one to the other at a pace a person can survive.

A list is a way of being in the room without being in it

Now the part I want you to see clearly, because once you see it the notebook loses its power over you.

When you write the plan, something in you settles. Genuinely settles. There is a real drop in the dread for about twenty minutes. That is not fake and it is not you being ridiculous. Your mind has been handed a version of the house it can hold, and holding it is a relief after months of not being able to.

The problem is what happens next. The relief wears off, the room is exactly as it was, and now there is a fourth piece of evidence in a notebook that you say things and nothing happens.

So the list does not just fail to help. It charges you for the twenty minutes.

You have been paying for a short rest with a long accusation, and that trade was never one you agreed to. The written word calls it deceiving your own selves, which is a description of a trap rather than a verdict on a character, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person out of a trap.

And here is the other thing about the list. Every version of it was a plan for the whole house. Not one of the four started with a surface. They started with rooms, and rooms have no edges you can get a hand around.

You were never refusing to do the list, and what you were refusing was a task nobody alive could begin. James 1:22 asks for a doer and never once asks for a doer of everything at the same time, and the Spirit of God is the one who cuts a task down to a size a tired person can actually hold.

One surface, and nothing written down

So here is what I am asking tonight, and I want to be exact about it.

You are able to finish a tray sized thing tonight, and its size has never once decided whether it was finished. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a deed that fits on a corner of a counter, and James 1:22 puts the blessing on the deed and never on the size of it.

Put the notebook face down. Not thrown away, not burned, not made into a symbol. Face down on a chair, out of sight.

Then clear one surface the size of a tea tray.

Not the counter. A tray shaped part of the counter, the part nearest your hand. Take what is on it off it. Put those things anywhere at all. On the floor is fine. In a bag is fine. Eighteen inches to the left on the same counter is fine.

Then stop.

I mean that. Not stop and assess. Not stop and make a note of how it went. Stop, and let that be the whole of tonight.

You are able to do one real thing tonight without first proving on paper that you can. It is written that the doer of the word is blessed in his deed rather than in his plan, and the Spirit of God is present in a deed the size of a tea tray in exactly the way He is present in a large one.