It Is The One Thing That Still Works

You read for half an hour on Tuesday and then felt bad about it.

Not while you were reading. While you were reading it was the best half hour of the week, and you knew that at the time, and you were aware of it in a way you are not usually aware of anything at the moment.

It was afterward. You closed it and stood up and the thought that arrived was about all the things you had not done, and the half hour turned retrospectively into something you had taken rather than something you had.

Everything is hard at the moment. I am not going to ask you what it is, because it is yours and this is not that kind of article, and because the shape of it does not change what I have to say.

What matters is that in the middle of it, reading still works.

Most things have stopped. Food is not doing much. Company is exhausting and also necessary and you cannot always tell which way round it is on a given day. Sleep is unreliable. Prayer, if you are honest, has been mostly silence.

And a book still works. Twenty minutes in and you are somewhere else, and your mind stops circling, and something in you unclenches slightly.

And you have started to feel guilty about that, which is what this article is for.

I want to say what I am not doing before I do anything else.

I am not going to prescribe this to you.

Nothing here says reading is good for you, or that it helps with what you are going through, or that you should do it as a way of coping. The moment it becomes a treatment it acquires a purpose, and a purpose means it can fail, and then the one thing that still works becomes one more thing you are doing badly.

A lamp unto my feet

There is a line about light in the longest psalm, and what it does not promise is the useful part.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. (Psalm 119:105, King James Version)

A lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.

Notice how small that lamp is.

A lamp unto my feet is not a floodlight over the landscape. It is the light of an oil lamp carried at walking height, and it shows you the next yard of road and nothing beyond it. You can see where to put your foot. You cannot see the destination, or the turn after this one, or whether the road improves.

That is deliberate, and it is not a lesser provision. It is the amount of light a person walking at night actually needs, which is enough for the next step.

And that is worth having, because you are currently in a stretch where nobody can tell you how long it lasts or what it looks like afterward, and every attempt to see further has produced nothing but more circling.

You are not being given the map. You are being given the next yard.

And here is what that has to do with a half hour on a Tuesday.

A lamp is not a destination and it is not a solution. It does not fix the road or shorten it. It is a small carried thing that makes the next bit walkable, and nobody carrying one at night has ever been told they should not need it.

Half an hour with a book is not solving your situation and is not meant to. It is the next yard being walkable. That is a real thing and it is enough, and it does not have to be justified by what it produces.

What you are given is enough for the next step, and a lamp has never once been asked to light the whole road. Psalm 119:105 puts the light at the feet rather than over the landscape, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a half hour that fixes nothing.

You are not taking it from anybody

Here is the practical part, and it is about the guilt rather than the reading.

Ask who the half hour was taken from.

Genuinely work through it. Somebody in your house went without something during those thirty minutes. Who, and what?

For nearly everybody who asks that question honestly, the answer is nobody. Some laundry sat in a machine slightly longer. A message went unanswered until the evening. The kitchen stayed as it was for half an hour.

Nobody was harmed. There is no person in your life who is worse off because you sat down on Tuesday.

So the guilt is not about a cost to anybody. It is about a rule, and the rule is roughly this: that in a hard season, a person is not entitled to anything that is only for them, and that everything must be either necessary or for somebody else.

Nobody taught you that in words. It arrives on its own, usually in people who are carrying more than their share, and it is one of the reasons they eventually stop functioning.

And I want to name the specific danger, because it is real. The thing you feel guilty about is currently the only thing that is holding. If the guilt wins, you will stop doing it, and then there will be nothing that works, and you will be entirely inside the hard thing with no yard of light at all.

Nobody went without anything during that half hour, and the guilt has never once been about a cost to another person. The written word gives the light at walking height without asking anybody to justify carrying it, and the Spirit of God is the one present where somebody sits down in a hard season.

Fifteen minutes, in useful time

So here is the assignment, and where it sits in the day is the whole instruction.

Read for fifteen minutes today at a time you would normally be doing something useful.

Not in the gaps. Not once everything is done, because everything is never done and that is why this has been happening only by accident.

At a time when there is something you could be doing. Mid-afternoon. While the machine is on. Before you start the tea rather than after. Sit down in the middle of the day, in the middle of the doing, and read for fifteen minutes.

That placement is the entire point, and it will feel wrong.

Because if you only read once everything is finished, then reading is what you are permitted after you have earned it, and the earning never completes, and you have accidentally built a system in which the thing that helps you is a reward you cannot qualify for.

Taking it in useful time breaks that. It says, with your body rather than with an argument, that this is not a reward.

Fifteen minutes. Then get up and do the thing you were going to do, which will still be there, and which will take exactly as long as it was going to take.

And afterward, when the accounting starts, and it will, ask the question again: who went without? Ask it in words. It works better out loud.

You are able to take it in useful time rather than as a reward, and the earning has never once been going to complete. Psalm 119:105 gives a lamp for the next step to somebody already walking, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman sitting down in the middle of an afternoon.