The Next Small Thing

There are four of them in the drawer, and she found all four on the same afternoon, looking for a charger.

The first has eleven pages. That was a good year. The second has six, and the handwriting gets faster and then stops mid sentence, on the fourteenth of February, in the middle of a thought about her mother. The third has three. The fourth has three as well, and the third of those pages is a plan for how to use the notebook.

She sat on the floor with them fanned out in front of her like a hand of cards, and she laughed, and then she did not.

Because she is not a lazy woman. That is the thing that makes no sense. She runs a department. She has never in her life failed to do something she said she would do for another human being. She has driven four hours to sit with somebody who needed her, twice, in one month.

She just cannot do this.

And what she has quietly concluded, over four notebooks and about nine years, is that she is a person of intentions. Real ones, warm ones, felt right down to the floor of her. And not one practice to her name.

She put them back in the drawer, on top of each other, the way you put something away when you have decided not to think about it. And then she stood there with her hand still on the drawer, and said, out loud, to nobody, "I would like to be different."

She has said that before. Every notebook starts with it.

The plan has never been the problem. The size of it has.

The least is not the leftovers

Here is the sentence, and it is the whole teaching, and it is nine words long before it doubles back on itself.

The one who is trustworthy in the least is trustworthy also in much.Luke 16:10

Take that on the floor of the spare room. You are already accepted and the notebook was never buying it. The word says he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing.

Read what it does not say. It does not say the least is a warm up for the much. It does not say do the least until you are strong enough for the real thing. It puts them in the same sentence and treats them as the same substance, and then it says the little one comes first.

Which means the eleven pages were not the good year. The eleven pages were a large intention wearing the clothes of a practice.

There was a man in the seventeen hundreds who had an experience of God at a meeting he did not want to attend and had gone to reluctantly. His heart, he said, was strangely warmed. It is one of the most quoted sentences in English religion, and almost nobody quotes what he did next, which was to build a timetable.

Not a movement. A timetable. Small groups that met at a set hour. A handful of plain questions asked out loud. And then a great deal of time in prisons and mines, which is where the warm heart actually went. The name that got attached to those people afterwards was not a compliment when it was coined. It was a joke about how methodical they were, and they kept it, because it happened to be accurate.

That is the whole invention, and it is available to you tonight. A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the way he held both was that the method was small enough to survive a bad week.

Here is the part to be careful about, because it is where this goes wrong and it goes wrong quickly. The practice buys you nothing. Not standing, not favor, not a better position with God. You already have all of that, and you have it because of Christ and not because of a notebook, and any practice that starts quietly issuing you a score has stopped being a practice and become a small religion with you at the door of it.

The practice is not the price. It is the shape.

And before the story, hear it plainly: you are accepted today at exactly the standing you had on the first page of the first notebook. His word says he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing, which is why the size was never the measure.