Standing In There For Two Minutes

You have read a lot of these.

That is the thing about you and this subject. You are not an under informed person. You have read articles about starting small and you have agreed with every one of them, and you have noticed a pattern in all of them that nobody admits.

Every single one is a first step.

Start with one drawer, and then the next drawer. Fifteen minutes, and then fifteen tomorrow. Small, as a technique for getting to big. The smallness is always instrumental. It is never the actual size of the thing.

And you have read enough of them to know what happens on day four, which is that day four does not come.

So here is what I want to offer you, and I want to be completely clear that I mean it literally.

Two minutes in that room, standing, moving nothing, is the whole assignment. Not step one. Not a warm up. Not the thin end of anything.

If it happens once and not a second time, the article worked.

I am aware that sounds like a trick, and I am going to spend the next few minutes showing you why it is not, out of a passage where a man is told to stop what he is doing and pay attention to the ground.

The ground is already holy

There is a moment at a burning bush where the instruction has nothing to do with the task.

Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. (Exodus 3:5, King James Version)

Read what is being said about the ground. Not: this ground becomes holy once the assignment is done.

The place whereon thou standest is holy. Present tense, before anything is asked, about a piece of desert that a man has simply walked onto.

You are standing on ground that is already holy, and standing on it has never once required you to do something with it. Exodus 3:5 declares the ground holy before one instruction is given, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has read every article about starting small.

And look at the actual instruction he receives.

Take your shoes off. That is it. It is not a task, it is not a plan, and it does nothing whatsoever about anything in that desert. It is an instruction about how to be where he already is.

You have been given something about how to be where you are, and it has never once been a first step toward a project. The written word issues a shoes off instruction before a single assignment, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who knows exactly what day four looks like.

Why small as a technique always fails

Let me name what has actually gone wrong with the small step articles, because the blame has been landing in the wrong place for years.

Small as a technique carries a hidden promise: that if you do the small thing, the big thing follows. So when the big thing does not follow, the small thing you did is retrospectively converted into a failure.

The drawer got done. The room did not follow. Now the drawer was pointless, and there is a woman who did a drawer once.

That is why you stopped. It was not laziness. It is that small steps under that arrangement have a negative return.

You were stopping because the arrangement produced a loss, and the stopping has never once been a lack of will. Exodus 3:5 gives an instruction with nothing downstream of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a woman who has been converted into a failure retroactively more than once.

So today is built with no downstream.

Two minutes in that room, standing, moving nothing. If nothing whatsoever happens afterward, nothing about today is diminished, because there is nothing attached to it for tomorrow to take away.

You are doing something nothing can retroactively spoil, and no day four has ever once had any power over it. The written word declares the ground holy on arrival, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has learned to distrust small beginnings.

What the two minutes actually is

So what is it for, if it is not a first step?

It is being in a room in your own house. That is the whole of it, and it is a thing you have not done for a long time, and it is worth something on its own.

You are being in a room in your own house, and that has never once needed to be for something else. Exodus 3:5 attends to the ground under a man's feet before anything else happens, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman standing still among boxes with nothing in her hands.

And if a first step does eventually come out of it, that is fine too.

It is simply not the point and it is not the deal, and nobody is going to check. The deal is two minutes, once, and then it is over and it counted.

You are allowed something that counts even if nothing follows, and nothing following has never once been able to take it back. The written word makes the standing itself the subject of the instruction, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a woman walking out of a room she has been in for two minutes.