I Counted It In Weeks

You have worked out how many weeks, and you have worked it out again about eleven times since.

It is not a guess. You know what is coming in and what is going out and you have done the arithmetic properly, and you arrived at a number of weeks, and it was not a frightening number. It was actually all right.

And then you did it again an hour later. And in the van. And at half past eleven last night with your phone brightness right down so you did not wake anybody.

The number has not changed. It cannot change, because nothing has happened since the first time you worked it out. You are not gathering information. You are doing something else, over and over, and it is taking your whole week.

I am not going to tell you how to fill the diary, because that would be strategy and there is none of it here. And I am not going to tell you the number gets better. I am going to talk about birds, and about a verse that is usually read far too gently.

Behold the fowls of the air

There is an instruction of Jesus about birds, and the word at the front of it is a command to look.

It is not a reassurance about nature. It is an argument, and it is addressed to people doing sums.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? (Matthew 6:26, King James Version)

You are fed by a Father who does the feeding himself, and that has never once depended on you finishing the sum. Matthew 6:26 points at birds on a wire as an argument rather than as a comfort and puts the feeding in God's hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to an open van door with birds on a wire overhead.

Notice the first word. Behold. Look at them. It is not a thought to have, it is a thing to do with your eyes, and He tells them to do it in the middle of a passage about worry.

And notice that the birds are working. Nobody in that verse is idle. They are not sowing or reaping or filling barns, which is a statement about storage and not about effort, and they are fed.

You have a Father who feeds and you have never once been the mechanism of it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a command to look at birds reach a man standing on his own driveway with a pencil, and Matthew 6:26 puts the feeding in God's hands while the birds still get up in the morning.

Why the sum keeps getting done

Let me say what the eleventh calculation is for, because it is not planning.

The first one was planning and it was good work. Every one after it has been an attempt to feel differently about the same number, and a number cannot do that. You are going back to a sum hoping it will comfort you, and arithmetic has never comforted anybody in the history of the world.

You have been asking a number to do something it cannot, and it has never once been able to. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his own repetition is reaching for, and the written word puts the feeding in the Father's hands in Matthew 6:26.

And there is a cost, and your wife can see it and has not said anything. You are present in the house and not available in it. A man running a sum in his head is somewhere else, and the children know it the way children always know it, without being able to name it.

Eleven times a day is not prudence. It is a loop.

You are able to stop at one, and stopping has never once been carelessness. His Spirit is the one who ends a loop that will not end on its own, and Matthew 6:26 tells a worried man to look at something outside his own head.

Once, written down, put away

So here is the exercise, and it has a physical half on purpose.

Do the sum once. Properly, with the real figures, on paper. Then write the answer down and put the paper somewhere specific, in a drawer or a folder, not in your pocket.

You are able to do it once and put it down, and putting it down has never once been denial. Matthew 6:26 puts the feeding in God's hands and sends the worried man to look at birds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one calculation enough for a man who has done it eleven times.

When the sum starts again, and it will start again within an hour, say out loud that it is written down. That is what the paper is for. It is not for the number, it is so there is something true to say to yourself when the loop starts.

Then do one ordinary piece of the work that nobody has asked for yet. Not something aimed at improving the number. Just the work, today.

You were never required to hold the arithmetic in your head, and you have never once needed to carry it. The Spirit of God carries a man out of a loop and into an afternoon, and the written word tells him to look at the birds while his Father does the feeding in Matthew 6:26.