Twenty Minutes Is All I Actually Have

You have been waiting for a Saturday.

Not this Saturday. There is a shift on this Saturday. The one after that there is the thing with your sister, and the one after that you are back on nights, and somewhere out past all of that there is a Saturday with nothing in it, and that is the one you have been planning around.

That Saturday has not turned up in about four years.

And here is what has been happening while you waited for it: you have been declining twenty minute windows all week, every week, because twenty minutes is obviously not enough to make a difference.

Tuesday you had twenty five minutes before you had to go. Wednesday you had half an hour after you got in and before you were too tired to be safe with a mug. Last night you sat on the edge of the bed for eighteen minutes doing nothing in particular.

Those were not nothing. Those were the actual amount of time a man in your job actually has, and you have been throwing them back because they did not look like the amount you were told you needed.

So this is not an article about making time. You do not have any more time and I am not going to pretend you do.

This is about the size of the unit, and about the fact that the twenty minutes you keep declining are the only currency in your pocket.

The day of small things

There is a question in Zechariah aimed at people who were embarrassed by how small their work looked.

For who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10, King James Version)

The people that question was aimed at were rebuilding, and what they had managed so far was visibly less than what had been there before. Older men who remembered the first house had wept when they saw the foundation of the second one, because it was small.

And the answer to that weeping was not encouragement about the future. It was a question with an edge on it: who exactly is doing the despising here.

You have been despising the day of small things in your own kitchen, and the size of the day has never once been the measure of it. Zechariah 4:10 defends a small beginning by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a man sitting on the edge of a bed for eighteen minutes.

Look at what the verse does not do. It does not promise the small thing becomes big.

It refuses the contempt. That is the whole move. The small thing is defended as it is, at the size it actually is, on the day it is actually happening.

You are holding twenty minutes that heaven refuses to hold in contempt, and nobody has ever needed a whole Saturday to be permitted to start. The written word puts a question mark over the despising and none over the smallness, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man between a shift and a sleep.

The Saturday is the problem

Here is the thing I want to name, and it is going to sound like bad news for about ten seconds.

The free Saturday is not late. It is not coming.

Your life has a shape. Shift work has a shape. Children have a shape. The open afternoon with nothing in it is a shape your life does not currently make, and waiting for it is not patience, it is a decision to do nothing for four more years.

You were never going to be given an afternoon, and waiting for one has never once been the same as preparing. Zechariah 4:10 asks who despises the small day rather than promising a bigger one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a man who has been planning around a Saturday that does not exist.

And notice what the waiting has been protecting.

If the unit is a whole afternoon, then every failure to start is somebody else's fault. The rota did it. The overtime did it. That is a comfortable arrangement, and it is also a cage, because a man whose starting depends on a rota he does not control never starts.

You have been holding a unit that put your own house outside your control, and that was never a thing you decided on purpose. The text defends the small day in the same breath it rebukes the despising, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has just seen a four year pattern in one sentence.

Twenty minutes is a real unit

So here is the practical half.

Twenty minutes does one drawer. Not part of a drawer. A whole drawer, emptied, chosen through, put back and shut, with nothing outstanding.

That is not a compromise version of the work. That is the work, at the size it fits into the life you actually have, and it produces the one thing four years of waiting has never produced, which is a finished thing.

You are able to complete something real inside the time you already have, and the completed thing has never once been smaller for having taken twenty minutes. Zechariah 4:10 asks its question straight at the contempt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man who finishes something before he leaves for work.

And let me be honest about what this does not do, because you would smell it if I were not.

One drawer does not change the house. Twenty drawers over twenty weeks would change the house, and I am not asking you for twenty weeks and I am not promising you the house. What one drawer changes is the thing between your ears that has decided nothing can begin until a Saturday clears.

You are doing this for one finished thing today and not for a house, and today has never once had to buy anything later. The written word defends the small day without predicting a large one, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a man who wants an honest answer and not a sales pitch.