Three Weeks And Then One Thing

You had three weeks.

Not a method and not a transformation. Three weeks of fifteen minutes most evenings, and by the end of it the kitchen was a room you could stand in and something in your chest had unclenched about a quarter of an inch.

And then one week happened. The kind everybody has. Something at work, or somebody ill, or four evenings in a row that belonged to other people.

And it went. All of it. Within about nine days the kitchen was back and so was the feeling, and you have not done fifteen minutes since.

And the sentence in your head is the one I want to deal with, because it is the expensive one. It goes: so it was not real.

That is what a person concludes when a good stretch does not survive a bad week. Not that the week was hard. That the three weeks were an illusion, a temporary state, something that happened to you rather than something you did.

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down

There is a verse in the Psalms with a very specific promise in it.

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. (Psalm 37:24, King James Version)

Not utterly cast down.

Now that is a strange promise if you think about it, because it does not say he will not fall. It grants the fall completely. What it denies is the totality.

Utterly cast down would be: everything gone, the ground itself lost, back to the beginning as if none of it had happened.

And that is exactly what your mind did with the three weeks. It did not record a setback. It recorded a total loss, and it went back to the beginning and marked the three weeks as never having occurred.

The verse denies precisely that.

You are not back where you started, and Psalm 37:24 has never once allowed a fall to be counted as a total loss. It is written that he is not utterly cast down, which grants the falling and denies the erasure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from writing off what actually happened.

You have been recording a bad week as a deletion. The word says he shall not be utterly cast down for the Lord upholdeth him, and the Spirit of God is the one who is holding on to something during a week when a person is not holding anything at all.

What the three weeks actually left behind

Now let me tell you what those three weeks did, because it is not nothing and it did not go anywhere.

You found out fifteen minutes is doable. That is knowledge and you cannot unlearn it. Before those three weeks you did not know that; now you do, and it is in you permanently.

You found out what the kitchen looks like when it is a room. Your eyes have that now. It is a reference point that did not exist before, and it will be there next time.

You are carrying three things out of those weeks that no bad week has ever once been able to take back. Psalm 37:24 grants the fall in full and denies the utter casting down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps what a person learned when the room stops showing it.

You found out what it feels like in your chest when it starts to lift. That is the thing that will actually get you back, and it is only available to somebody who has felt it, which now includes you and did not before.

None of those three things went back. The kitchen went back. The three things did not.

You were never returned to the beginning, and there has never once been a stretch of real work that left nothing behind in the person who did it. Psalm 37:24 denies the utter casting down while granting the fall, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps what a person learned when the room stops showing it.

So tonight is not a restart. It cannot be, because you are not at the start.

You are permitted to begin again from where you actually are, and where you actually are has never once been the same place you began. It is written that the Lord upholdeth him with his hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a fifteen minutes done by somebody who is further on than they think.

Fifteen minutes, from where you are

So here is the whole of it.

Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Work on anything.

When it goes, stop. Do not do extra to get back to where the kitchen was three weeks ago. Nobody is behind here, and there is nothing to catch up on.

Then stop and do nothing else.

You are able to do fifteen minutes tonight, and it has never once required you to first recover the ground you think you lost. Psalm 37:24 has the hand still holding during the fall, and the Spirit of God is present in an ordinary fifteen minutes on the far side of a bad week.