I Did It Once And Did Not Check

The act is not the problem. You do the act.

You did something for yourself on Tuesday. Ten minutes, warm water, hands, whatever it was. It happened and it was pleasant and nobody had to be persuaded.

What happened next is the whole subject.

You checked.

Not immediately, and not obviously. But at some point in the following hour there was a look, or a touch, or a small assessment, and the assessment produced a result, and the result decided whether the ten minutes counted.

That is the audit, and it arrives on the end of everything, and it is doing more damage than any single unkind thought you have ever had about your own face.

I want to ask the question that nobody asks, because it is the one that takes the whole thing apart.

What would a good result look like?

Not vaguely. Specifically. What would you have to find, an hour after ten minutes of warm water, for the ten minutes to have been justified?

There is no answer. There cannot be. Nothing measurable happens to a body in an hour, and if there were a result it would be too small to detect, and you know all of this already.

So the check is looking for something that cannot exist, and it comes back empty every single time, and the empty result gets read as a verdict on the ten minutes.

What the audit does to an act

Follow what happens to the ten minutes once the audit exists.

They stop being ten minutes. They become an application, and the check is the decision, and the decision always comes back negative because nothing measurable was ever going to happen.

So the ten minutes are converted, retrospectively, into a failure. Every time. And they were not a failure. They were ten warm minutes and they were pleasant while they were happening.

You are converting something pleasant into a failed application, and no ten minutes of warm water has ever once been able to produce a measurable result. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what happens after the good part, and Psalm 131 has a person deliberately quieting something in themselves.

And here is the second half.

The audit is why nothing lasts.

This has happened before. There have been weeks where something kind got done several days running, and then it stopped, and the conclusion drawn was probably that you do not keep things up.

That is not what happened. What happened is that each act was audited, each audit came back empty, and after four or five empty results the whole practice was quietly discontinued on the evidence.

It did not stop because you lack discipline. It stopped because a review board kept ruling against it.

You are running a practice that gets discontinued by its own reviews, and the stopping has never once been about discipline. Scripture in Psalm 131 says I have behaved and quieted myself as a child that is weaned, and the Spirit of God is the one who dissolves a review board a woman never appointed.

I have quieted myself

There is a very short psalm, three verses long, and the middle one is the whole thing.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. (Psalm 131:2, King James Version)

Quieted myself. It is an act, and David does it, and he reports having done it.

Not: I became peaceful. Not: peace arrived. I have quieted myself, which is something a person does to something in themselves that was making noise.

And the image he uses is exact. A weaned child. Not a hungry one.

A child at the breast is there for something. There is a purpose to the contact and a result being obtained. A weaned child on its mother is there for no reason at all, and that is precisely the difference, and David chose that image on purpose.

You are offered a nearness with no result being obtained, and a weaned child has never once been at its mother for something. It is written in Psalm 131 that my soul is even as a weaned child, and the Holy Spirit is the one who quiets a thing in a woman that has been making noise at the end of every good act.

And notice what is not in that psalm.

There is no measuring. The first verse says he does not exercise himself in great matters or in things too high for him, which is a man declining to assess things that are not his to assess.

The whole psalm is a person putting down an evaluation they were never required to make.

You are permitted to decline an assessment nobody ever asked you for, and no result has ever once been owed by ten minutes of an evening. The Spirit of God is what quiets an assessment in a woman rather than answering it, and the written word says surely I have behaved and quieted myself.

Do it and go to bed

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the only part that matters.

Do one thing tonight and then go straight to bed without checking anything.

The act itself can be whatever you already do. Warm water, hands, hair, feet, ten minutes with a hot drink. That part is easy and it has been done before.

Then, when it is finished, put the light off and go to bed. No look. No touch. No small assessment on the way past. No look in the morning either, which is the harder half and where most of these go.

Here is what that produces. One act, in your whole life, that was allowed to finish.

Not judged. Not scored. Finished, the way a thing finishes when nobody reviews it, which is how every act of care you have ever performed on another human being has been allowed to end.

You are able to let one thing finish without a ruling on it, and no act of care you have given anybody else has ever once been audited afterward. The written word in Psalm 131 has a person quieting themselves rather than answering the noise, and the Holy Spirit is what lets ten minutes end as ten minutes.