That Does Not Count

There is a journal in Tasha's house with four entries in it.

Her sister gave it to her. Good paper, the kind you feel bad writing in badly. Four entries, and if you look at the dates they are spread across fourteen months, and the first one starts, "Right. From today."

She has three under seven.

She has also downloaded three reading plans and she is on day four of all three of them, and one of them sends her a notification every morning at six fifteen that she swipes away while holding a child.

She is not lazy. She gets up before all of them most days and she is doing the work of about two and a half people, and the reason there is nothing in that journal is not a character flaw and everybody reading this who has been in that house knows it.

Here is what is actually happening to her, and it is worse than the journal.

She has decided she does not have one.

Not a plan, a life. She has quietly filed herself, over about four years, as somebody who used to have something with God and does not currently, and she is waiting for a season that will give it back to her. School, maybe. When the youngest is in school.

She sat at a table in the spring with four women talking about their mornings.

Nobody was showing off. It was a good table and they are good women and one of them was being honest about how badly hers was going.

Tasha did not say anything.

And driving home, all three asleep in the back at the same time, which had not happened in a month, she came to a level crossing and the barrier came down.

Nine minutes.

And she sat there in the quiet with three sleeping children behind her and she cried, and then she prayed, and it was not tidy and there were no words in it that anybody would write down, and it was the most real thing that had happened to her in about four weeks.

And then the barrier went up.

And her very first thought, before she had even got into gear, was this:

That does not count.

Now let me ask you what you have decided does not count.

Because everybody in this situation has one. The nine minutes at the crossing. The thing you say in the shower. The sentence you say over a sleeping child's head at eleven at night. And you have been sorting your life into a real column and a not-really column, and the real column has been empty for four years.

Where the shape was supposed to go

Moses is giving Israel the most important sentence they have, and then he tells them where to keep it.

You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.Deuteronomy 6:7

Look at that list, because it is the whole point of this article.

When you sit in your house. When you walk by the way. When you lie down. When you rise up.

Four things, and not one of them is a devotional slot. There is no early morning in that verse. There is no quiet, there is no chair, there is no journal and there is no hour that has been protected from anybody.

Those four are simply the load-bearing joints of an ordinary day, and He tells them to stitch it there.

This is order. It is thoroughly ordered: it names four fixed points and it repeats them and Israel wrote them on their doorframes so they would hit them on the way past. But the fixed points are places you were already going to be.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a car at a level crossing with three children asleep behind you. The nine minutes counted, and the shape you have been failing to build for four years was never the shape you were given. That is written into the verse that tells a whole nation where to keep the most important thing they own, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one at work in a mother in a car, and He was not waiting for the youngest to start school.

Now let me not hand you another system, because I would be the fifth person this year and the other four are on your phone.

I am not going to tell you what your week should look like. I do not know your week. I do not know which of your children does not sleep, or what your shifts are, or whether you have anybody. Anybody who writes you a schedule without knowing that is selling something.

And I am not going to tell you the early morning hour is wrong. It is a good thing and some of those women at that table have one and it is real, and if a season comes when you can, take it.

Here is what I am saying.

You have been measuring your life against a shape that is not in this verse, failing to reach it, and concluding you have nothing.

The four joints are still in your day. You still sit in your house. You still walk by the way, and yours is a school run and a supermarket and a car at a crossing. You still lie down, later than you should. You still rise up, and usually before you want to.

Those are the fixed points. They were always the fixed points. Nothing about your life has removed a single one of them, and every one of them has been available every day for four years.

And here is the part that is going to cost you: the reason you dismissed the nine minutes is not humility. It is that they were free. They cost you no discipline and no early alarm and no journal, and somewhere you picked up the idea that a thing only counts if it cost you something.

The word says His mercies are new every morning, which arrives without being scheduled, and the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness and prays in us with groanings too deep for words. That verse describes exactly what happened at the crossing, and it is the only description in the Bible of a prayer with no words in it that God receives.

Her seven-year-old said grace at dinner three weeks later and put something specific in it. A phrase. And Tasha put her fork down, because it was hers, out of the car, in a conversation she does not even remember having.

She had no idea he was listening. Nobody ever does. That is what walk by the way means.