My Glad Keeps Getting Interrupted By A List

It happened on Thursday morning by the back door.

You were putting something down and you looked up and the light was coming across the yard the way it does at that hour in this month, and something opened in you.

It lasted about four seconds.

And then the list arrived, fully formed, with the fence at the top of it, and the thing about the gate, and whether the tree at the back is going to be a problem, and by the time you had straightened up the four seconds were gone and you were doing arithmetic about a fence.

That is the shape of it now.

It happens maybe once every couple of days. The glad comes, unannounced, in a doorway or on the stairs or standing in the kitchen at night with a glass of water. And it is real. It is not imagined and it is not forced.

And it gets about four seconds and then the list takes over, every single time, and you have started to feel that you are not actually enjoying this at all.

Four seconds is not a failure

Let me say the thing I most want you to hear, before anything else, because I think it will change the week.

Four seconds counted.

Those moments have been getting filed as failed attempts at gladness, because of how quickly they ended. And what actually happened, twice this week, is that a woman stood in her own house and something in her opened and she was glad.

That happened. It is not less real for having been brief. Nothing anywhere says gladness has to last twenty minutes to be recorded.

You have had real gladness in a doorway, and four seconds has never once been the same as nothing. The Holy Spirit is the one who was standing by the back door on Thursday morning, and it is written in 1 Timothy 6 that God giveth us richly all things to enjoy.

And now let me say something about the list, because the list is not your enemy and treating it as one will not work.

The list is doing its job. A person who owns a place has to hold a list, and yours is accurate, and the fence probably does need doing. The problem is not that the list exists. The problem is that it has a shorter fuse than the gladness does, and it arrives first every time.

There is no fixing that by getting rid of the list. The only way through it is to get something in ahead of the list.

You have a window that opens before the list arrives, and four seconds has never once been too little time for two words. The Holy Spirit is the one standing in the doorway during the four seconds, and first Timothy 6 says God giveth us richly all things to enjoy.

You have four seconds before the list arrives, and four seconds has never once been too short a window to put something in. First Timothy 6 says all things are given richly to enjoy, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the enjoying in the purpose rather than leaving it to whatever is left over.

Richly all things to enjoy

Here is the verse, and its setting is worth knowing because it protects you from a misreading.

Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. (1 Timothy 6:17, King James Version)

That passage is a warning. It is spoken to people with money and it tells them plainly not to be proud and not to lean on what they own, because it is uncertain.

And in the middle of that warning, Paul puts this: who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.

He does not say God gives us things to steward, or to be careful with, or to be anxious about. He says richly, and he says to enjoy, and he puts it in a passage that is otherwise entirely about not trusting in stuff.

You have been given things with the enjoying named as the purpose, and no verse anywhere has ever once described a good thing as given in order to be worried over. The Holy Spirit is the one who thought both belonged in the same sentence, and the written word puts richly and enjoy inside a warning about riches.

And notice what that does to your list.

The list is about the house being kept. The verse is about the house being enjoyed. Those are two different relationships to the same building, and only one of them is named in that sentence as the reason it was given.

Which means the four seconds by the back door were not a distraction from the real business of owning a house. They were the business. The fence is the support work.

You have had the actual point of the thing, for four seconds on Thursday, and a list of jobs has never once been the reason anybody was given a house. First Timothy 6 names the enjoying as what the giving is for, and the Spirit of God is the one who ordered it that way.