An Hour Went And I Feel Worse

You were going to look at one thing.

There was a specific reason. Somebody had sent something, or you were checking a time, and then an hour went, and now you are sitting in the same chair feeling something that was not in you when you sat down.

And you could not tell anybody what did it.

That is the strangest part and it is the part that matters. If you could name it, if there was one picture or one person you could point to, this would be a much smaller problem. But there is no single thing. There is an hour, and there is a mood, and there is no line between them that anybody could draw.

Back home we talk about what the sea leaves. You walk a beach after a storm and there is a line of things along the tideline, and nobody watched any of it arrive. It came in a hundred small pushes over a night when nobody was there.

That is what an hour of faces does. Nothing arrives with a splash. It arrives in three hundred small pushes and it is all sitting there at the end.

What came in unnoticed

Let us count what actually happened in that hour, because it is a lot.

Somewhere between two hundred and four hundred faces, most of them chosen, lit and adjusted, arriving at about one every three seconds.

And with each one, a tiny automatic response that you did not authorize and could not have stopped, because it is faster than authorization. Not a thought. Something more like a flinch or a lean, and then the next one arrives.

Three hundred of those in an hour, none of them big enough to notice individually, all of them landing in the same place.

You are receiving three hundred small landings in an hour and noticing none of them, and no single one has ever once been large enough to see. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what came in during a stretch nobody was watching, and Proverbs 4 gives an instruction about guarding the place where a life comes out of.

And here is the second thing, which is about the ending rather than the hour.

There is no closing.

When you leave a room full of people, the leaving is a physical act. You say goodbye. You walk out. Your body knows the thing is over and something in you closes the file.

An hour on a screen has no leaving in it. You put the phone down, and the last face is still where the previous three hundred went, and nothing closed, because nothing physical happened at the end.

You are ending an hour with no closing in it, and no screen has ever once given anybody the physical act that finishes a thing. Scripture in Proverbs 4 says keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts a closing where there was not one.

Keep thy heart with all diligence

There is an instruction in the fourth chapter of Proverbs that reads like a security order, because that is what it is.

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23, King James Version)

Keep is a guard word. It is the same word used for keeping a garden and keeping a flock and keeping a city, and every one of those means watching what goes in and out.

With all diligence. Not casually. Not when you remember. The instruction assumes the thing needs actual attention, which means the writer expects that unguarded is the default.

You are given an instruction that assumes things get in unless somebody is watching, and Scripture has never once treated a heart as self sealing. It is written in Proverbs 4 that we keep the heart with all diligence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stands at a gate a woman has been leaving open without knowing.

And look at the reason attached to it.

For out of it are the issues of life. Everything comes out of there. What you do, how you speak to your family at eight o'clock, whether the evening is any good, what kind of woman is in that house tonight.

That is why the guarding matters, and it is not about the phone. It is about what the phone is delivering into the place everything else comes out of.

You are guarding the place your whole evening comes out of, and the guarding has never once been about the object in your hand. The Spirit of God is what makes a woman aware of a gate rather than of a device, and the written word says out of it are the issues of life.

The phone in another room

So here is the assignment, and it is a physical closing rather than a rule.

Put the phone in another room for one hour tonight, and do one warm slow thing.

Another room. Not face down, not on silent, not across the table. In a different room with a door between, because the point is the physical act.

That is the closing that the hour never had. Walking somewhere and putting a thing down is exactly what leaving a room of people does, and it does for a body what a rule about screen time never does.

You are able to close an hour that never had a closing, and no evening has ever once ended itself while a thing was still in your hand. Proverbs 4 says keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life, and the Holy Spirit is what teaches a woman to put something down and walk.

And then the warm slow thing, which is the actual care, and which is not a substitute for anything. Warm water, unhurried hands, ten minutes.

Here is what you will find. The hour that comes after is longer than an hour has been in a while. That is not mystical. It is what happens when the small landings stop for sixty minutes.

You are able to close an hour with a physical act, and no rule about a screen has ever once done what walking into another room does. The written word in Proverbs 4 sets a guard on the place a life comes out of, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten warm minutes into care rather than into a replacement activity.