We Start Things And They Last Two Weeks

Nine days is the record and everybody in this house knows it.

There was the thing in February that got to nine. There was the one before Easter that made eleven. There was a chart, once, and everybody was enthusiastic and the enthusiasm is genuinely the problem, and I will come back to that.

You have started six things in three years and the longest ran about two weeks.

So there is now a particular atmosphere when you propose something. Not resistance. Something more corrosive than resistance: a sort of pleasant agreement from people who have privately concluded that this will be over by the end of the month.

Your children have learned that things in this house begin brightly and stop.

And you can feel that being learned, which is why you are reading the last article of seven rather than the first.

Here is what I want to fix, and it is not your persistence.

Every one of those six things was designed to be broken by a bad week. Not one of them had a bad week written into it. They were all built for the version of your family that turns up, and your family, like every family, does not turn up about a third of the time.

He that is faithful in that which is least

There is a line in Luke about faithfulness that is usually applied to money, and the mechanism in it is about size.

He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. (Luke 16:10, King James Version)

He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.

Faithful in the least. The smallest available thing, named as the place where the faithfulness is demonstrated.

You have a verse that locates the whole quality in the smallest item rather than the largest, and Luke 16:10 has never once measured faithfulness by the size of what somebody attempted. The least is where it is tested, and the Holy Spirit is the one who builds something durable out of the smallest available piece.

You are able to see why that matters for a household with your history.

All six were sized for the enthusiasm at the beginning. That is the natural thing to do. On the evening a thing gets decided there is a great deal of energy in the room, and what gets built is proportionate to the energy that was in it that night.

And then the energy goes, because energy goes, and the thing that is left is sized for a resource that is no longer there.

The verse points the other way. It says start at the least, which is the size that survives when there is nothing behind it.

You are able to build at the smallest size available, and Luke 16:10 has never once treated the least as the beginner's version of something. The Spirit of God is the one who works in what is small enough to keep, and the verse puts the faithfulness in the least rather than in the much.

Design the bad week in

Here is the specific engineering, and it is the one thing that has been missing from all six attempts.

The bad week is not an interruption. It is part of the design.

You have never once built a thing that expected to be missed, and Luke 16:10 has never made faithfulness the same as an unbroken run. It is written that he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a household through the weeks nothing happens.

Every one of your six had an implicit assumption that it would happen every time. Nobody said it out loud. It was in the structure. A chart has boxes and the boxes are meant to be filled, and the first empty box is a visible failure, and the second empty box ends it.

So this one has no chart, and it has a rule stated at the front, and the rule is: we miss some.

Say it on the first day. This is a thing we do on Saturdays, and some Saturdays we will not, and that is part of it.

That sentence does something structural. It means the first missed week is not evidence, it is the thing working as described. There is nothing to conclude and nothing to salvage and nobody has to decide whether it is over.

You are able to say out loud that this will be missed, and saying so in advance has never once been the same as expecting it to fail. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in the week after a missed one, and Luke 16:10 puts the faithfulness in the least rather than in the unbroken.

The same ten minutes, the same place

So here is the assignment.

Pick one morning this week and do the same ten minutes you did last time, in the same place, with the same people.

You are able to do the identical thing again, and repeating it exactly has never once been a lower form of commitment than improving it. It is written faithful in that which is least, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the fourth identical Saturday.

The same. That is the whole instruction and it is the part that will bore you by week three.

Same morning. Same route or same place, walked together by the same people. Same ten minutes. Do not add anything, do not vary it to keep it interesting, and above all do not improve it, because improving it is how a small thing becomes a big thing and a big thing is what dies at nine days.

And when you miss one, which you will, say nothing at all about it the following week. Do not acknowledge it. Do not say we missed last week. Just do it again, in the same place, as though the gap did not occur.

You have permission to let a missed week pass without comment, and never mentioning it has never once been the same as not noticing. Luke 16:10 makes the least the place where faithfulness lives, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a family back to the same corner on the fifth Saturday.

That is the whole of the seven. One small repeating thing, with the missing built in, at the least possible size.