I Put One Thing Away And Lost An Hour

I want to describe your last hour back to you, and I would like you to tell me whether I have it right.

You went in to do the front room. You picked up a mug. The mug belongs in the kitchen, so you took it to the kitchen. In the kitchen there was a bag that belongs in the hall. In the hall there was a jacket that belongs upstairs. Upstairs you saw the bathroom and thought, well, while I am here.

And an hour later you came back down, and the front room was exactly as you had left it, and something in you sat down.

Here is what I know about that hour. You did not waste it. You worked the entire time. You did not sit on your phone and you did not lose your nerve. You carried things to the places they were supposed to go, which is, on the face of it, the correct thing to do with them.

And you have nothing to show for it, and you cannot explain that to anybody, including yourself, without sounding like somebody making an excuse.

So most nights now you do not start, because you have learned that starting means an hour disappearing and the room staying the same.

Let thine eyes look right on

There is a line in Proverbs that reads like advice to a traveler and turns out to be advice for a person in a hallway.

Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. (Proverbs 4:25, King James Version)

Look right on. Straight before thee.

Now I have heard that verse used to mean concentrate harder, and I do not think that is what it says at all. It is not about effort. It is about direction. It is a line about where the eyes are pointed, and it is written to somebody who is walking, and it assumes there is a great deal on either side worth looking at.

That is the whole picture. Not a person who lacks discipline. A person on a path with things on both sides of it, being told that the path is the thing.

And the reason it has to be said is that everything on either side is legitimate. That is the trouble. Nobody gets pulled off a path by things that do not matter. The jacket really does belong upstairs. The bag really does belong in the hall.

You are not scattered, and Proverbs 4:25 has never once addressed itself to a person who does not care. It is written as an instruction about the eyes rather than about the will, which means the fix is aim and not force, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies an aim in a person who is already trying.

You have been obeying every true thing you saw, one after another, until the hour was gone. The word puts the whole matter on looking straight before thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who can hold a willing person still without holding them down.

The chain is made of correct decisions

I want to name the mechanism, because once it has a name it stops being a mystery about your character.

Every link in that chain was right. The mug does go in the kitchen. Putting it there was not a mistake. The problem is that the house is arranged so that being right about the mug hands you the bag, and being right about the bag hands you the jacket, and there is no natural place in that chain where a person is allowed to stop.

A chain of correct decisions with no exit is not a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and the design is not yours, because nobody designed it. It happened.

You were never failing to finish, and what actually happened is that you were handed a task with no end in it. Proverbs 4:25 gives a walker one direction to hold rather than a list of things to ignore, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts an end on a thing that has quietly had none.

So here is the change, and it is one rule, and it is small.

Nothing leaves the room.

Whatever you pick up tonight, it does not go where it belongs. It goes anywhere inside the room where you stand. On the floor by the door. In a bag in the corner. On the chair.

That will feel wrong. It will feel like doing the job badly. I want to say clearly that it is not doing the job badly, it is doing a different job, and the different job is the one that can actually be finished tonight.

You are permitted to leave a mug in the wrong room, and doing that has never once made you a careless person. It is written that the eyes look right on, which is permission to leave what is on either side exactly where it is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the guilt out of a thing set down in the wrong place.

One surface, and no doorways

So here is the whole of it.

Stand in one room. Choose one surface, the size of a tea tray, and clear it.

Every single thing you lift stays in that room. Not one item crosses a doorway tonight. If it belongs in the kitchen, it can spend the night on the floor by the wall.

Then stop.

You are able to finish something tonight, and finishing has never once required every object to reach its proper home first. Proverbs 4:25 asks for one direction held, and the Spirit of God is present in a cleared tray with a mug on the floor beside it exactly as much as He would be in a perfect house.