I Look At The Whole House And Do Nothing

You stood in the doorway again and then you went and put the kettle on.

I know that walk. You came to the door of a room with the genuine intention of starting something, and you stood there for maybe forty seconds, and your eyes went round the whole of it, and by the time they got back to where they started you were tired, and you turned around, and now you are in the kitchen doing something else.

Nothing was moved. Nothing was decided. And you have added one more entry to a long private record of times you meant to and did not.

That record is doing more harm than the room is. I want to say that first, because you probably think the problem is the state of the house.

It is not. The problem is a mismatch between the size of what you keep attempting and the size of what a person can actually finish.

Here is what happens in those forty seconds, and it is worth understanding rather than being ashamed of.

You look at a room and your mind does not see a corner. It sees the whole thing at once, and then it helpfully connects it to the other rooms, and to the cupboard you would have to empty first, and to the fact that the thing on the landing would need somewhere to go, and to the bags in the spare room. Within about thirty seconds you are no longer looking at a room. You are holding the entire house in your head at once, and it weighs what a house weighs.

Nobody can start anything while holding that. It is not laziness and it is not a character defect. It is the completely reasonable response of a person who has been handed something the size of a house.

So we are going to take the house off you.

The day of small things

There is a question in Zechariah that is asked rather than argued, and the fact that it is a question is the point.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth. (Zechariah 4:10, King James Version)

Who hath despised the day of small things.

That is asked into a situation where people were rebuilding something that had been enormous, and the new one was not going to be enormous, and everybody knew it, and they were embarrassed.

And notice what is not said. It is not said that the small thing will become large. It is not a promise that this is a first step toward the grand version. That reading is imported by people who cannot bear a small thing to be simply worth doing.

What it says is that a day of small things is not to be despised. The despising is the error being named. Not the smallness.

And then there is the plummet in the hand. A plummet is a plumb line, the tool a builder uses to check that one wall is true. It is the most ordinary instrument on the site and it only ever measures a small part at a time. You cannot plumb a house. You plumb one wall.

That is what is being held in the hand at the moment described as worth rejoicing over. Not a plan for the whole building. One tool, checking one part.

One corner done true is a thing not to be despised, and the smallness has never once been the error being named. Zechariah 4:10 puts the rejoicing over a plumb line held against one wall, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a whole house out of somebody's hands.

The unit has to be finishable

Here is the practical rule, and it is worth more than any advice about decorating.

Whatever you attempt has to be smaller than what you can finish in the time you have.

Not equal to. Smaller. Because you will be interrupted, and it will take longer than you think, and if the unit is exactly the size of your available time then you will not finish, and not finishing is the thing that has been feeding the record all these years.

You do not actually need the house to be done. You need one experience of finishing something, because you have not had one in a long time and it has quietly persuaded you that you are somebody who does not finish things.

That belief is the real damage, and it is not true. You finish things every day. You finish work and meals and the school run. You do not finish this, because this is the only area of your life where you consistently start with an impossible unit.

So the change is not effort. You have plenty of effort. The change is arithmetic.

Finishing one small thing is what has been missing, and it has never once been effort that you were short of. The written word refuses to despise a day of small things, and the Spirit of God is the one who breaks a belief a person has built out of unfinished afternoons.

One corner, twenty minutes, stop

So here is the assignment, and the third part is the one that matters.

Pick one corner, set a timer for twenty minutes, and stop when it goes.

One corner. Not one room. An actual corner, small enough that you could stand in it and touch two walls. The end of a countertop. One shelf. The bit beside the front door.

Set an actual timer. On your phone, out loud, where you can hear it. Not a rough intention about twenty minutes, because a rough intention becomes an hour and then becomes never doing it again.

And then stop when it goes. This is the part people ignore and it is the whole mechanism.

You will not want to stop. That is the point. If it is going well you will want to keep going and roll into the next bit, and if you do that you have quietly restored the impossible unit and you will be exhausted and it will be two months before you try again.

Stop while you still want to carry on. Walk away with the corner finished and appetite left over. That combination is what makes a person come back tomorrow, and coming back tomorrow is worth more than any single afternoon of effort.

It is possible to stop while it is still going well, and stopping has never once been the same as giving up. Zechariah 4:10 has the rejoicing over one plumb line rather than over a finished building, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody putting something down at twenty minutes.