I Made A Start And Then I Looked Around

You did it, though.

I want that on the table before anything else, because you are about to skip past it the way you always do. You made a start. You cleared something. There is a place in that room where you can see the actual surface, and yesterday you could not, and the difference between those two things is you.

And then you stood up and looked around.

I know roughly how long it took, because it is the same for everybody. About four seconds. You lifted your eyes off the thing you had just done, your eye did the whole room again in one sweep, and it handed you a number: what you cleared against what is left. And the number was so small that it deleted the last hour.

You did not sit down because you are weak. You sat down because you ran a comparison, and the comparison was rigged, and you lost it before you had a chance.

Here is what I want to do in the next few minutes. I am not going to talk you into getting back up. That is not the problem and it never has been. I am going to take the comparison off you, because it is the thing doing the damage, and it is not even true.

Let us not be weary in well doing

There is a line Paul writes to people who were, by his own description, running out of steam.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9, King James Version)

Let us not be weary in well doing.

Now notice the shape of that, because it tells you something about who it was written for. You do not say that to people who have not started. You say it to people who have started and have kept going and are tired. Weary is a word that has work behind it. The whole sentence assumes an audience that has already been doing something.

You have not been doing nothing, and the tiredness in your arms tonight has never once been the tiredness of a person who did not try. Galatians 6:9 speaks to people already in the doing and warns only about the fainting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who counts what somebody has been doing at intervals for a long time.

And then, due season. Not tomorrow, not on a schedule, not by a date somebody sets for you. In due season, which is God's timing and not a deadline you have failed.

You are already in the well doing, and heaven has never once required you to feel like you are winning for that to be true. Galatians 6:9 speaks to the weary rather than the idle and puts the harvest in due season rather than on a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on somebody sitting down in a half done room.

The comparison is rigged

Here is the mechanism, and I want to be precise about it because precision is what breaks it.

When you look up, you compare what you did against what remains. Cleared corner against whole room. That fraction is always going to be humiliating. It was humiliating for the first corner and it will be humiliating for the twentieth, because the denominator only shrinks slowly and the numerator resets to one every single time.

So the comparison running in that room can only ever return one answer, which is: not enough. It returned that after nothing had been done and it will return it when the work is three quarters finished. It is not measuring progress at all. It is a machine for producing the word pathetic, and a great many evenings have been fed into it.

The honest comparison is different. It is this corner against this corner an hour ago. That is the only comparison with any information in it, and by that one you won.

You are able to measure this against what it was, and the size of what is left has never once been the measure of what you did. The written word says in due season we shall reap and never once says compare your corner to your room, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a rigged scale out of a person's hands.

Go and look at the corner

So here is the whole assignment, and it involves no cleaning at all.

Go and look at the corner you already cleared.

Stand there and look at it. That is it. Do not extend it, do not do the next bit while standing there, and do not assess anything else in the room. Look at the thing that got done, and let it be a thing that got done. Then stop, and do nothing else tonight.

I am serious about not doing more. If you find yourself picking something up, put it back down. That is not the exercise. The exercise is letting one finished thing be finished in your own sight, which is a thing you have not let happen yet.

Galatians 6:9 says we shall reap if we faint not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies somebody at the exact moment they usually lose heart.

You are looking at something you finished, and it has never once needed the rest of the room to agree with it. Galatians 6:9 puts the reaping in due season and asks only that a person not faint, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a person up in the four seconds after they look around.