It Has Become a Second Job

It is about two hours a day now and you have never once added it up until this week.

The reading, which came first and which you would not want to lose. The journal, which somebody suggested and which does help. The gratitude thing, three items, which is genuinely good and takes four minutes. The walk, which is exercise and prayer at once and is therefore twice as hard to skip. The memorizing, which you started in the spring. The other reading, the one from the plan, which is not the same as the first reading.

Every single one of those arrived as a good idea and every one of them was.

Nothing was ever imposed on you. You chose each of them freely, one at a time, over about four years, and at the moment of adopting each one you were delighted about it.

And now it is two hours, and it starts at ten past five, and last Thursday you were three items behind by nine in the morning and something in you was tight about it all day.

That is the thing to look at. Not the practices. The tightness.

You have assembled, out of things that were each given to you as freedom, a structure that you now serve.

What this page will not do

This is the closing category and its rule is that nothing gets added, so there is no better arrangement coming.

I am not going to give you a trimmed-down routine. That is what everybody does with this and it is a smaller version of the same object.

I am not going to tell you which to keep, because that would be me choosing, and part of what has happened is that every item on that list arrived on somebody else's recommendation.

I am not going to tell you the practices are legalism. They are not; several of them have genuinely fed you, and calling good things legalism is how people talk themselves out of everything and end up with nothing.

And I am not going to tell you to have a rest day, because you would schedule it.

You are not failing at a discipline you agreed to. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not calibrated to a completed morning, and the Holy Spirit is in that kitchen at ten past five with a woman who is three items behind.

The verse is about not being tied back up

There is a line at the start of Galatians 5 with a warning in it that is usually applied to doctrine and applies just as exactly to a routine.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.Galatians 5:1

Entangled again. That is the phrase, and the word again is doing the work.

Paul is writing to people who had been set free and had then, quite sincerely and without anybody forcing them, taken on a structure of good religious practices, each of which had a decent argument behind it.

He does not accuse them of insincerity. He describes the shape of what has happened: freedom, and then, by accretion, an entanglement.

And notice the word entangled, which is not the word for being captured. It is the word for what happens to a person walking through undergrowth. Nobody trapped them. They kept moving and things kept catching, and after a while they could not move freely and could not point at the moment it started.

That is four years and six practices.

You are not in bondage because you did something wrong. Scripture says stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage, Galatians 5:1, and the entangling is described as something that happens to somebody moving rather than as a punishment, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who tied any of it on.

Where the tightness came from

Each item is small. That is the mechanism.

Nothing on that list is unreasonable on its own, which means there has never been a moment when the reasonable thing was to refuse one. Four minutes for gratitude; who would argue? Ten minutes of memorizing; that is nothing.

So there has been no point at which you could have said no without sounding like somebody making excuses, including to yourself.

And there is a second thing. Because you chose them freely, missing one is not a rule broken; it is a promise to yourself broken, and that is considerably worse. A rule can be argued with. A promise you made when you were at your best cannot, and every one of these was made on a good day. It is written, in Galatians 5:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

That is why Thursday was tight all day. You were not in trouble with anybody. You were in trouble with the version of you who adopted them.

You are not answerable to the woman who made those promises. Scripture says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, Psalm 103:14, and it is offered as the ground of how God deals with people rather than as an allowance, and the Holy Spirit has never once held anybody to a schedule made on their best morning.

What is put down

One of them. Entirely, for a week, chosen by you.

Not reduced. Not moved to the evening. Dropped, for seven days, with nothing put in the gap.

You will want to choose the smallest. Choose whichever one produces the most tightness when you imagine not doing it, because that is the one that has stopped being a gift.

And do not tell anybody, because announcing it turns it into a discipline.

And do not fill the time. That is the whole exercise: seven days with a hole in the morning and nothing in it.

There is nothing after this. No plan for what happens in week two, no framework for evaluating which practices to keep. If at the end of the week you want it back, take it back, and take it back as a thing you want rather than a thing you owe.

You are not required to keep every promise you made to yourself on a good day. Scripture says come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, Matthew 11:28, and the rest is given rather than scheduled into a routine, and the Holy Spirit is not evaluating anybody's completed list at nine in the morning.