I Can Clean It What I Cannot Do Is Keep It

You can do it. That has never been the question.

You have proved it more than once. There has been a week where you went at it and the room came back, and you stood in it, and for a few days it was a room you would have let somebody walk into. So the doing is not the missing piece. You have the doing.

And then about eleven days later it was gone again, and that is the part that finished you.

Because the first time it went, you told yourself you had been busy. The second time you started to suspect something. And by the third or fourth time you had arrived at a conclusion about yourself, and I think the conclusion is roughly this: other people were issued with something I was not. A discipline. A gear. Whatever it is that makes a person keep a thing they have made.

That is the belief I want to get at, because it is doing more damage than any pile in this house. It is why you do not start now. There is no point cleaning it if you cannot keep it, so you leave it, and then you carry the leaving as more evidence of the same thing.

Here is what is actually true, and I am not softening it to be kind. You were not issued with less than everybody else. What you are missing is not a virtue. It is fifteen minutes, most days, and permission to miss some.

They are new every morning

There is a line in the middle of Lamentations, which is a book written by somebody standing in actual ruins.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:23, King James Version)

New every morning.

Now sit with where that sentence is. It is not in a book about a good season. It is in the middle of a lament, written by a man looking at a destroyed city, and the sentence he reaches for is that the mercies arrive fresh at the start of every single day.

Which means the supply is not a tank issued once and spent down ever since. That is how it has been pictured in this house. A certain amount of whatever it takes, used up in that one good week, and nothing but empty since.

You have never once been running on the last of something, and no week in your life has drawn down a supply that arrives new in the morning. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning, present tense and daily, and the Holy Spirit is the one who delivers it rather than rationing what is left.

New every morning says otherwise. It says the arrangement is daily and it resets, and the resetting is not earned by yesterday going well.

And notice the second half, because it names where the reliability actually sits. Great is thy faithfulness. His, not yours. The thing being described as dependable in that sentence is not the man standing in the ruins.

You are handed a fresh supply every morning, and it has never once depended on how yesterday went. Lamentations 3:23 puts the mercies as new every morning and calls the faithfulness His rather than the reader's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a daily arrangement believable to somebody who has been keeping score.

Missing days are in the design

Here is the thing I most want handed over, and it is the opposite of what everybody says.

Missing days are normal. They are not the failure of the thing. They are part of how it actually works for everybody, including the people whose houses look fine to you.

The picture being carried is one where keeping it means an unbroken run, and one gap means the run is dead and everything is back at nothing. That picture is why it stops. Not for want of discipline. Because it is a rule that guarantees a total loss the first time life gets in the way, and life always gets in the way.

You have been working to a rule that guarantees a total loss the first time life interferes, and no arrangement like that has ever once been survivable. Lamentations 3:23 makes the mercies new every morning rather than continuous, and the Spirit of God is the one who delivers daily to somebody who kept nothing back.

New every morning does not say unbroken. It says new. It assumes yesterday ended and something fresh arrives, which is the exact opposite of an unbroken run.

So: days will be missed. A week will be missed. There will be a stretch in November with nothing in it at all. None of that undoes what was done, and none of it puts anybody back at the beginning, because a house is not an unbroken run either.

You are allowed to miss days, and a gap has never once canceled what came before it. The written word says the mercies are new every morning rather than continuous, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends the scorekeeping that a person has been losing every time.

Fifteen minutes, and then stop

So here is the whole of it, and I want to be careful, because this is the row where a routine tries to sneak in and I am not letting it.

Nothing here is a method. There is no schedule, no zones, no days of the week, nothing to keep up with, and nothing anybody can fall behind on. A thing like that works for nine days and then becomes one more place to fail.

Do fifteen minutes today. Then stop.

Not fifteen minutes every day. Not fifteen minutes as the first step of something. Fifteen minutes today, in this house, on whatever is nearest, and then stop even if you feel like carrying on. Especially if you feel like carrying on, actually, because the day that runs to ninety minutes is usually the day before two weeks with nothing in them at all.

Lamentations 3:23 puts the supply on a daily footing and never once on a run, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes stopping at fifteen minutes feel like obedience instead of quitting.

You are able to give fifteen minutes today, and tomorrow has never once been part of what you are agreeing to. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a quarter of an hour that leads nowhere in particular.