A Decision That Only Costs Me

Sorcha has been turning it over for seven months and she has never once mentioned it to anybody, and the reason is not privacy.

It is that she cannot make it sound important enough to say out loud.

Nobody else is affected. There is no money in it worth the name. No one would be inconvenienced, nobody would have to change anything, and if she did it tomorrow the only person whose life would look different is her.

Which is precisely why she cannot decide it.

She has a rule about her own time and she has never examined it. Decisions get thinking in proportion to who they cost, and a decision that costs only her sits at the bottom of that list, and so she thinks about it in the gaps: on the way to the car, standing at the sink, and always with a small feeling of being caught at something.

Seven months of ten-second thoughts. Which is nowhere near enough thinking to reach a conclusion, and considerably more than enough to be tired.

She is forty-four. And she noticed the shape of it about a fortnight ago, at a friend's kitchen table, when the friend spent forty minutes on a decision about her own daughter and Sorcha listened properly and gave it her whole attention and was glad to.

And on the way home she thought: I have never once given mine forty minutes.

Not because it does not deserve them. Because she does not have a category for a thing that matters only to her.

You may know that car journey.

Maybe you have something too. Something with nobody else's name on it, that you have been carrying in ten second installments for months, and have never been able to say out loud without adding it is silly, really.

The word at the end of the verse

There is a line in Psalm 37 that people know, and the part that matters here is the clause after the comma.

The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.Psalm 37:23

He delighteth in his way.

Now, the grammar there has been read both directions for centuries and I am not going to settle it, and it does not need settling for what I want to show you.

Either God delights in the man's way, or the man delights in it because God ordered it. Both readings put delight into the sentence, and delight is not a word about consequence. It is not there because the steps were important. It is there because they are his.

And notice what the verse concerns itself with. Steps. Not decisions of state. Not the ones with other people's names on them. The ordinary going about of an ordinary man, attended to closely, by God, and enjoyed.

And your steps are ordered and not only the ones that cost somebody else. The written word puts the ordering on steps rather than on significant events, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman thinking in ten second installments at a sink.

And you are not required to justify the size of it. The word attaches delight rather than importance to a person's way, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than assessing whether a thing was worth the time.

The rule you have never examined

Let me say plainly what the rule is doing, because I think you saw its shape on that drive and have not been able to name it since.

The rule says: my own life is the residual category. Everything with somebody else in it gets the good hours, and what is left over gets me.

That rule has made you a person others trust, and I am not going to take it off you wholesale, because a great deal of it is love and it has done real good and forty minutes at that kitchen table was a gift.

But look at what it produces when it runs unchecked. It does not produce more time for others. It produces a woman who has been carrying a small live question for seven months, which is its own quiet drain, and which has probably taken more of her in total than forty honest minutes would have taken in one go.

The rule is not even efficient at the thing it exists for.

And you are allowed to give your own life proper attention. The word says thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, which sets the loving of yourself as the measure rather than as the thing to be spent, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than indulgent.

And nothing about you is under review for taking the time. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who feels caught every time she thinks about it.

What forty minutes would actually be

One more thing, and it is small and practical.

You have been treating this as a decision that needs a conclusion. I am not sure that is what it needs first.

What it has never had is one uninterrupted stretch of your own attention, held on purpose, without the ten second guillotine. Not to resolve it. To hear it properly once.

Some things resolve themselves the moment they are given a chair.

And you will know what to do when you need to know it. The word says the LORD will guide thee continually, and continually is not a word about ceremony or scale, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover a small thing in an ordinary life.