Item Four On The List I Do Not Look At

There is a list, and Ffion has never written it down.

That is the first thing to understand about it. It has no paper. It lives somewhere behind her breastbone and it presents itself, complete and in order, at particular moments: at about eleven at night, and in the shower, and occasionally at a red light for no reason at all.

She can recite it, though she never would.

One is the letter from the school about her son that she read twice and has not answered.

Two is a friendship that went wrong in June, in a way she still does not understand, and a message on her phone that has been marked unread for eleven weeks on purpose.

Three is her father, and the conversation about the stairs, and whether he ought to still be doing them.

Four is the light on her dashboard.

Now, if you asked Ffion what is wrong, she would tell you honestly that nothing is wrong. And she would be telling the truth as she experiences it, because none of those four things is a crisis. Not one of them is on fire. Any one of them, taken alone on a good Tuesday, would be a slightly awkward twenty minutes.

The trouble is that they do not present themselves alone. They arrive as a set. And a set has a weight that none of the items has.

So at eleven at night, the light on the dashboard is not a light on a dashboard. It is the fourth thing. It comes into the room with a letter and a friendship and her father's stairs standing behind it, and it is asked to be answered along with all of them, and of course it is not answered, because nobody can answer four things at eleven at night.

And in the morning it goes back to being a small orange shape she drives past.

The light has been on since the last week of July. Ffion could not tell you which week the letter came, and she could not tell you exactly when the friendship went quiet, and the thing about her father has been true for over a year.

There is no crisis anywhere in this. There is just a woman going about a competent life with a set behind her breastbone that she never puts down, because she has never once been offered the possibility of putting down one quarter of it.

The day was given a portion, and it was given one day's worth

Let me say what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess what your light is. I have not seen the car and would not know, and a voice at a distance guessing at a dashboard helps nobody. And I am not going to work through your list with you, because three of the four items are not mine and I have not earned them.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to take one thing off the set.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.Matthew 6:34

Now, that last sentence gets read as a sigh. People say it the way you say well, that's life.

But look at what it is actually claiming, because it is a much stronger thing than a sigh.

It says each day has a sufficiency of its own trouble. Not a scarcity. Not an overflow. A sufficiency. Which means the day in front of you has been given a portion sized for the day, and it is enough, and it fits.

The whole verse is an instruction about loading. Do not stack tomorrow's onto today's, because today has already been issued the correct weight and adding to it makes a day that cannot be carried, not because you are weak, but because the day was never designed to hold that much.

You are not overwhelmed because something is wrong with you, and Scripture says plainly that a day has a portion and it was never meant to hold four of them. It is written that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, which is Jesus describing the design of a day rather than complaining about it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine permission and not a nice thought.

You have been carrying a set that was assembled out of four separate days, and no part of the written word ever asked anybody to do that. Matthew 6 puts each day's trouble inside its own day on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an old instruction about loading land on a woman at eleven at night.

One quarter is a real thing to put down

Here is what I want to give you, and it is not a strategy. It is a permission.

Take one off the set. Not the biggest one. Not the important one. The smallest one, the one with the least attached, the one that would take the fewest minutes if it stood alone.

That is the light on the dashboard.

Now, everything in a conscientious woman will object to that, and the objection sounds like this: it is the least important one, so doing it is avoidance. If she is going to spend energy, it should go to her father or her son.

I want to answer that as carefully as I can, because it is the sentence that keeps the whole set intact.

The set is not four problems. The set is one weight made of four problems. And a weight does not care which item is removed. Take out the lightest one and the weight goes down by exactly as much as that item was contributing.

And there is something else. A set that has never been reduced teaches a person that it cannot be reduced. Four goes to three, and a thing that has been true for eleven weeks stops being true, and the body learns something it did not know this morning.

You have permission to take the easiest one first, and no verse anywhere ranks a person's obedience by the difficulty of the task. Zechariah says who has despised the day of small things, which is God defending a small beginning against the people looking down on it, and the Spirit of God is what makes a small beginning honorable rather than evasive.

You were never asked to solve four things, and Scripture only ever hands out today. Matthew 6 tells the anxious to stop taking thought for the morrow, which leaves exactly one day in a person's hands at any moment, and His Spirit is the one who makes that division of the week actually bearable.