The document is called PLAN FINAL v3 and it is beautiful.
Ninety days. Color coded. There is a tab for prayer and a tab for reading and a tab for the gym and a tab, and she is not proud of this one, called ACCOUNTABILITY, which contains a list of people she was going to send weekly updates to and never told.
She started it on the first of January at six fifteen in the morning, which is a time she has never once got up at in her life apart from on the first of January.
Day one: everything. Day two: everything. Day three: everything, and she was tired but exhilarated, and she told her sister on the phone that this year felt different.
Day four was a Saturday and she did most of it.
Day five something happened at work.
Day nine she opened the document, looked at the four boxes not ticked from the previous three days, and closed the laptop, and has not opened it since.
That was this year. There is a v2 from last year and a v1 from the year before, and there are two more before that with different names entirely.
Five years.
And here is what she has concluded, and she said it to a friend in a coffee shop in a light voice with a laugh at the end of it, which is how people say the things they actually believe: "I am just not a disciplined person."
That sentence is the thing I want to get at. Not the plan. The verdict she has passed on herself five times in a row and has now more or less accepted as a fact about her nature.
Heaven does not despise the small
There is a line in Zechariah spoken to people rebuilding a temple that was going to be nothing like the one their grandparents remembered. It was smaller. Everybody could see it was smaller. Some of the old men had wept out loud at the foundation because of how much less it was.
And into that, God says this.
For who hath despised the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10
Take that on day nine with the laptop shut. You are not despised and you never were. The word asks who hath despised the day of small things, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the building, at a size you have overruled five Januaries running.
It is a question, and it is aimed. Somebody was despising the day of small things. It was not God.
Read it as what it is, which is a rebuke of the sneer, not of the small. The building was small and the building was right. The problem in that valley was never the size of the foundation; it was a group of people who could not look at a modest true thing without measuring it against a magnificent remembered one.
So hear this where you sit, and know that it is not my encouragement, it is what is written: you are not despised on day nine, and nothing about your standing moved between day one and day nine. His word asks who has despised the day of small things, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a live question in a kitchen with a closed laptop on the counter.
Five plans have died. Not one of them was your salvation and not one of them was your standing. Those were settled by Christ and they were never on the spreadsheet.
There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he did not want to attend, and who wrote that his heart was strangely warmed, and who then did the thing that made the difference. He built a timetable.
Not a ninety day transformation. A timetable.
Small groups meeting at a set hour. A handful of plain questions asked out loud. Rising early, yes, but the genius of it was never the ambition, it was the smallness: practices ordinary enough that a laborer with a fourteen hour day and no candles could keep them. Then a great deal of time in prisons and mines, which is where the warmed heart actually went.
The name that got attached to those people was coined as an insult about how methodical they were, and they kept it, because it fit.
A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the reason the method survived is that it was small enough to survive a bad week, which is the only test a practice ever actually faces.
Your plan has never once been tested by a good week. It has been killed, five times, by an ordinary one.
You do not have a discipline problem. You have a sizing problem, and they look identical from the inside, which is why you have spent five years diagnosing the wrong one.
And they look identical from inside, which is why five years went past. His word asks who hath despised the day of small things, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing, at a size you keep overruling.
Look at the arithmetic honestly. Your plan required a version of you with no job stress, no bad nights and no unexpected phone calls. Such a person has never existed on this earth. So the plan was not a plan, it was a portrait of somebody you would like to be, and portraits cannot be executed, only admired and then quietly turned to the wall on day nine.
So make it smaller. Then smaller than that. Make it so small that it is almost funny.
One verse. One sentence of prayer. One minute standing at the counter with your hand flat on it. Something that survives a fever, a delayed train and a Tuesday when you feel nothing at all.
And then attach it to something that already happens, because you are not building willpower, you are borrowing a rhythm that is already running in your house. The kettle. The car door. The moment you sit down at your desk.
You are already accepted, right now, as you read this, at exactly the standing you had at six fifteen on the first of January, and I am not saying that to be nice; it is written that there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness of that on day nine and on day ninety alike.
The practice buys you nothing. Hear that, because it is where this goes wrong fastest. It is not the price of anything. It is the shape of a life, and a shape can be small and still be a shape.
The small thing is the real thing. Day nine of something you actually do is further than day one of something magnificent.
You are accepted this evening at exactly the standing you had at a quarter past six on the first of January. His word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness to that on day nine and on day ninety without adjusting the figure.
Declare this over yourself
- Ninety day plan, you are a portrait and you are not a practice, and you do not get to decide anything about me. His word asks who has despised the day of small things, so I take the small thing on purpose in the name of Jesus.
- Verdict I have passed on myself five Januaries running, that I am simply not a disciplined person, you have no ground here. Scripture says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is His Spirit and not a ticked box who bears witness that I am His.
- God, the small thing is the real thing and I am doing the small thing today. Your word says You do not despise the day of small things, so I am not waiting for the first of January, and the kettle is going on now.
Zechariah 4:10
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