Twenty Years Of Covering It

There is a date in your head at all times and there has been since about 2004.

Not written down anywhere. You do not need it written down. You know, at any moment on any day, roughly how long it has been and roughly how long there is, and the number moves in the background the way the weather does.

That is a small piece of accounting that has been running continuously for twenty years.

And there is the thing itself, which takes a couple of hours, and the small planning that surrounds it, and the arrangements that get made around holidays and weddings and any week where somebody will be taking photographs.

I have watched women carry this for years and I want to say the first thing carefully, because it matters more than anything else in this piece.

I am not going to tell you to stop.

That would be a rule, and a rule would be worse than the thing it replaced. A woman who has done something for twenty years and enjoys parts of it does not need a man telling her to give it up, and if that is what you were braced for you can stop bracing.

What I want to look at is something else entirely, which is the tiredness.

Because you are tired in a way that does not correspond to anything on your calendar, and I think I know where some of it is coming from.

What a standing appointment costs

Here is a distinction that unlocks it.

There is a difference between a thing you do and a thing you must keep doing.

A thing you do has stopping in it. If you skipped it, nothing would follow except that you had skipped it. It is genuinely optional and it feels optional, and that feeling is most of what makes it pleasant.

A thing you must keep doing has no stopping in it. There is a deadline attached to it always, and the deadline never expires, and every time you meet it a new one appears. That is not a choice any more. That is an obligation with no end date.

You are keeping an appointment that has never once had an end date attached to it, and no schedule that regenerates itself has ever been a free thing. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman which of two categories a habit belongs in, and Galatians 5 has one word for a standing obligation nobody can ever finish.

And now the tiredness, which is what you actually came in with.

A background obligation running for twenty years is not free. It is not free even when each individual instance is manageable, because the cost is not in the instances. It is in the running.

Some small part of your attention has been permanently allocated to this since 2004, and it has never once been released, not on a holiday, not on a good week, not on any day at all. That is what has made you tired in a way that does not match the calendar.

You are tired from something that has never once been switched off, and no single occurrence of it has ever been the thing costing you anything. Scripture in Galatians 5 says stand fast in the liberty, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman what has been running in the background of a life.

Stand fast in the liberty

Paul writes one sentence to a church that had gone back under an obligation, and it is short and it is not gentle.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (Galatians 5:1, King James Version)

Entangled again. That is the word I want you to have.

Not enslaved, at least not first. Entangled. Which is what happens gradually, without a decision, when a thing wraps round you a little at a time and nobody notices the day it stopped being loose.

You are entangled rather than caught, and nothing that wrapped around you that slowly has ever once been a decision you made. Galatians 5 says be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names a thing that arrived without a day attached to it.

That is exactly the shape of a twenty year schedule. There was no year you chose bondage. There were two hundred and forty separate reasonable decisions.

You are entangled rather than enslaved, and there has never once been a day when anybody sat down and chose this. It is written in Galatians 5 that we are not to be entangled again with the yoke of bondage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman how a thing wrapped round without ever being agreed to.

And notice what the verse asks for, because it is not what people assume.

It does not say stop doing the thing. Paul is not, in that letter, telling anybody that the practice itself is wicked. He says elsewhere that a person can keep a day or not keep it and both are fine.

What he objects to is the yoke. The must. The thing that has stopped being a choice and become a requirement, and the freedom he asks them to stand in is the freedom of it being genuinely optional.

You are called to a liberty that has never once required you to give anything up, and the yoke has never been the practice itself. The Spirit of God is what turns a requirement back into a choice in a woman's own week, and the written word says stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

One thing with no schedule on it

So here is the assignment, and notice that it does not touch the appointment.

Do one thing for your hair this week that has no schedule attached to it at all.

Nothing to do with the date. Nothing that counts toward anything. Not an early one, not a touch up, not maintenance of any kind.

Ten minutes of warm water and unhurried hands, for comfort, on a day chosen for no reason.

You are choosing a day for no reason at all, and comfort has never once needed an occasion to justify it. Galatians 5 says stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman spend an evening without a reason for it.

Here is why this is the right assignment rather than the obvious one. Liberty does not arrive by canceling an appointment, because canceling is still the calendar deciding what happens. You get it by having one act in the week that the calendar has nothing to do with.

One unscheduled thing in twenty years of scheduled ones is a genuinely different item, and it is the only thing in this whole piece that has never once been tried.

You are able to do one thing that no calendar has any claim on, and there has never once been an act in twenty years that was outside the schedule. The written word in Galatians 5 puts the freedom in the standing rather than in the stopping, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten unscheduled minutes into care rather than into a small rebellion.