I Will Never Keep Up With Any Of It

You are not going to keep up and you have known that for a while.

What is new is that saying it has stopped feeling like a defeat and started feeling like something closer to a plain fact, and you are not sure what to do with that.

Because everything you have ever been told about this assumes the chasing. Every piece of advice, every offer of help, every well meant conversation, has been about how to chase more efficiently.

Nobody has ever suggested that the chasing itself was optional.

So let me say the thing this page exists to say, and then let us look at what is actually left when it has been said.

You do not have to keep up.

Not as a comfort. Not as a consolation prize for somebody who cannot. As an actual fact about how any of this works.

Nobody keeps up. Not one person on this earth. The people who look as though they do are keeping up with three or four things and letting the rest go past exactly as you do, and nobody has ever told you that because nobody says it out loud.

One thing is needful

There is a moment in a kitchen where one woman is doing everything and another is sitting still, and the sentence about it is short.

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:42, King James Version)

One thing is needful. Not several. Not a reasonable number. One.

And it is said in a house where a great deal was going on and one woman was managing all of it.

You are already holding the one thing that is needful, and no list of everything has ever once been what was actually required of anybody. Luke 10:42 says one thing is needful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than another instruction.

Notice what is not said to Martha. She is not told she is a bad host, or lazy, or that the meal did not matter.

What she is told is that she is cumbered about with much serving, and that a great deal of it was never necessary in the first place.

You have been cumbered about with much of something that was never once necessary, and no amount of it has ever been asked for by the one it was being done for. The Holy Spirit is the one who names an unnecessary burden without shaming the person carrying it, and it is written that the trouble was the muchness rather than the serving.

And notice the last clause, which is the part that settles it. Which shall not be taken away from her.

The good part is permanent. It is not at risk from anything, and nothing that changes next year can reach it.

You were never holding something that could be taken from you, and no change anywhere has ever once been able to reach the part that was chosen. The Spirit of God is the one who guards a permanent thing while everything temporary moves, and Scripture puts the not being taken away right at the end where it cannot be missed.

What is left when the chasing stops

Now let me be concrete, because relief without anything solid underneath it does not last past Tuesday.

If the chasing is not required, what actually is?

A small number of things that your life genuinely needs. That is the whole of it. Not the things somebody thinks you would like, and not the things that are available, and not the things everybody else appears to have.

The things your week actually requires.

You are being asked for a small number rather than an increasing one, and no life has ever once required everything that happened to be available to it. The Spirit of God is the one who reduces a requirement to what is real, and Luke 10:42 puts the number at one where a whole household was busy.

And here is the part nobody has told you, and it is the reason this is relief and not resignation.

You almost certainly already do all of them.

Most people who feel this way, when they finally write down what they actually need, find that they can already do every item on the list. The exhaustion was never about a gap. It was about an infinite list nobody could ever finish.

That is a gap in the teaching and it is not a gap in you.

You have almost certainly already got the whole of what your own week requires, and no exhaustion has ever once come from a real gap when the list was never finishable. The written word puts one thing at the center of a busy house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person what their own list actually contains.

Write the three

Now the small thing, and it is a piece of paper.

I am not going to suggest anything to learn. Not now and not later, and there is no small sentence at the end of this piece hinting that you might want to one day.

Write down the three things you actually need a screen to do.

You are able to write three lines and be done with it, and three named things have never once been too small a list for anybody's life. Luke 10:42 puts the needful at one in a house where much was being served, and the Holy Spirit is the one present while somebody writes their own list.

Three, or two, or four. Whatever it honestly is. Do not pad it and do not add anything that somebody else thinks should be on it.

Be specific. Not communication. The actual thing, described the way you would say it to a friend.

Then look at the list and put a mark beside every one you can already do.

For most people that is all of them. And if it is all of them, sit with the page for a minute, because it means the thing that has been exhausting you was never a shortfall at all.

You are writing a list that ends rather than one that grows, and three lines on a page have never once been a smaller thing than an endless one. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person a finishable list, and it is written that the good part cannot be taken away from the one who chose it.