The Step You Sit On Anyway

She has meant to start a prayer journal since about 1968.

She has bought three. One of them is that good kind with the ribbon in it and she has never written in it because it seemed too nice for a first page that might go wrong.

She has meant to memorize a psalm a month. She has meant to read the Bible through in a year, four times, and she got as far as Numbers once. She has meant to fast on Fridays. She has meant to pray for missionaries, properly, with a list, in an ordered way.

Eighty one years old and none of it done.

That is her own accounting and she gave it to me plainly, on her own porch, with her hands round a mug, in the tone of a woman reporting the weather.

Here is what she did not put on the list.

Every morning of her adult life, in every house she has lived in, she has come out and sat on the step with the first cup of coffee. Winter too, with a coat on. She sits there for somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour. She looks at whatever is in front of her, which over the years has been a road, a cornfield, a parking lot for eleven bad years in the seventies, and now a yard with a wire fence and a maple.

And she talks to God. Out loud, quietly, the whole time.

She has done that six days a week for sixty odd years and she does not count it, because she has never once written it down, and because nobody ever told her that this is what it looks like.

Study to be quiet

Paul writes a line to a young church that is one of the least ambitious instructions in the New Testament, and it is deliberate.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Take that on the step with the first cup. You have been obeying that line since before your neighbors were born. The word says study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the company out there every morning.

Study to be quiet. Do your own business. Work with your own hands.

That is what he told them to aim at. Not a program. Not a scheme. An ordinary life, done attentively, on purpose, in front of God. And notice the word study, which means it takes effort and it takes years, and that a person can be genuinely working at it while it looks like nothing whatsoever from the road.

So take this on your step, and know it is not me being kind to an old woman, it is what is written: you have been obeying that verse since before most of your neighbors were born. His word says study to be quiet, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been out on that step with you every morning of sixty years, whether or not anybody handed you a name for it.

You do not have a lifetime of grand intentions. You have a lifetime of grand intentions and one enormous kept practice, and you have been keeping accounts on only one of the columns.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who got met by God in a little room and wrote that his heart was strangely warmed, and who then built a rule of life for a whole movement of ordinary folks.

Look at what he actually built.

A short reading. Six people in a room once a week. A handful of plain questions asked out loud. That was very nearly all of it, and it was made that way because it was for servant girls with fourteen hour days and miners coming up off a night shift, people who had no candles, no privacy and no hour they controlled.

He kept a heavier rule himself, up at four, fasting twice a week. He never handed that to them and called it the standard. He knew the difference between his own practice and one that a working woman could actually keep, and that difference is the reason the whole thing lasted.

They got the nickname because somebody was mocking how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was true.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is a timetable and nothing else. He held both, and the method lived because it was small and it was in the shape of an ordinary week.

Your step is exactly that. Small, ordinary, attached to something that happens anyway, which is the first cup of coffee.