What I See In The Drain

The day gets decided at about ten past seven and it takes four seconds.

You are standing there with the water running and you look down, and there is a small amount of something at your feet, and you assess it. Not consciously. It is faster than that. It is more like reading a gauge.

And there is a good version of the number and a bad version of the number, and the bad version follows you into the car.

I want to be careful and kind here, because there is a version of this conversation that skips straight to reassurance and I have never once seen that help anybody. Somebody will tell you everybody sheds. That is true, and you know it, and it has not touched this for a single morning.

So let us go at what is actually happening, which is a measurement being taken under conditions that make it useless, and then acted on all day.

A gauge with no scale on it

Think about what would be required for that number to mean anything.

You would need to know what yesterday's was, exactly. And the day before. You would need the same water pressure, the same length of shower, the same amount of time since the last wash, and a consistent way of counting, and none of those things is true from one morning to the next.

What you actually have is an impression, formed in four seconds, in a wet room, with no record of any kind, compared against a memory that is itself an impression.

And from that you produce a verdict that runs until about four in the afternoon.

You are holding a gauge that has never once had a scale on it, and four seconds in a wet room has never been able to measure anything. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what a measurement actually requires, and Psalm 56 says what God does with things nobody else counts.

Now the part that matters more than the arithmetic.

The counting has made the shower into a checkpoint.

That was once ten minutes of warm water, which is one of the plainest good things a body gets in a day. It is now a place where an assessment happens, and the assessment sits at the end of it, so the whole ten minutes is spent arriving at a result.

A thing with a verdict at the end of it is not a rest. It is an exam.

You are sitting an exam every morning in the one room that used to be warm, and hot water has never once owed anybody a result. Scripture in Psalm 56 has God keeping account of a person's tears in a bottle, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a checkpoint back and makes it a shower again.

Into thy bottle

There is a verse in the fifty sixth Psalm that I have never got over, and it is about counting.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Tellest, in that old English, means counts. Thou countest my wanderings.

And then the image, which is one of the strangest and most tender in the whole Bible. Put my tears into thy bottle. As though every one of them were worth keeping, gathered, and stored, and then a question at the end which expects the answer yes: are they not in thy book?

That is a God who counts. He counts things nobody else counts, and He counts them because they matter to Him, and every single one is kept.

You are known by somebody who counts what nobody else would, and that counting has never once been done to produce a verdict about you. It is written in Psalm 56 that He puts our tears into His bottle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman the difference between being counted and being assessed.

And that is the distinction I want you to have.

There are two kinds of counting.

One is measurement. It exists to produce a number, the number gets compared to something, and a judgment comes out at the end. That is what happens in the shower.

The other is the counting in that verse. It exists because the thing counted is precious to the one doing the counting. Nothing is being assessed. Nothing comes out at the end except that it is kept.

You have been doing the first kind on your own body every morning, while the second kind has been going on around you the whole time.

You are being counted in the second way at the exact hour you are counting yourself in the first, and the two have never once been the same act. The Spirit of God is what puts a woman inside a counting that keeps rather than one that grades, and the written word says put thou my tears into thy bottle.

Once, without looking down

So here is the assignment, and it is one shower.

Get out once without looking down.

That is the whole thing. One morning this week, turn the water off and step out and dry yourself and go and get dressed, and do not look at the floor of the shower on the way.

There are two things to know about it.

It will be difficult in a way that is out of proportion to what is being asked, and that is the most useful information in this article. A four second glance that is genuinely hard to skip is not a glance any more.

And nothing is lost by skipping it. There is no decision that depends on the number. Nothing is done differently at eight in the morning based on what was there at ten past seven. It has never once been actionable.

You are able to skip a reading that has never once changed a single thing you did afterward, and no morning of your life has ever turned on it. Psalm 56 records a God who counts in order to keep rather than to grade, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a woman out of a bathroom without a finding.

Then, afterward, do one warm slow thing for your hair with no result attached. Ordinary care, unhurried, no checking. The shower is not the care. The shower has been the exam. This is the care.

You are able to step out of one shower without a verdict, and that number has never once been actionable in a single morning of your life. The written word in Psalm 56 records a God who counts what is precious, and the Holy Spirit is what turns ten warm minutes into care rather than into an assessment.