I Have Done This For Years Without Thinking

Somewhere over three hundred times.

That is the arithmetic if it is roughly weekly and it has been six years, and that is the figure you arrived at on Sunday when somebody asked how long you had had it.

And what you noticed immediately afterward is that you cannot remember one of them.

Not one. Not a single occasion of watering that plant is available to you as a memory. They happened. There is a plant on the sill to prove it. And the whole of it has gone through you without leaving anything.

And that is not a comfortable thing to notice about six years of your own life.

So the question is not whether it counted. It did. The question is whether you were there.

Let us not be weary in well doing

Paul writes a line in Galatians about the long stretch, and the weariness he names is a specific kind.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9, King James Version)

Let us not be weary in well doing.

You are inside the exact stretch that verse addresses, and six years of the same small act has never once been the sort of thing that gets noticed by the one doing it. Galatians 6:9 says let us not be weary in well doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over somebody who has done a thing three hundred times.

Notice the phrase. Weary in well doing, not weary of it.

Not disillusioned, not resentful, not doubting whether the thing is worth doing. Weary in it, which is what happens to a person inside a long stretch of something good: not opposition, just the slow draining of presence out of a repeated act.

And the instruction is not to do more, or to do it better. It is to not go numb inside it.

You were never told to increase anything, and what the verse guards against has never once been the amount of work you are doing. The Spirit of God is what makes that a live warning rather than a general encouragement, and Galatians 6 is where the weariness is named.

Autopilot is not the enemy

Now the practical half, and it starts with a defense of the last six years.

Autopilot is why that plant is alive.

If watering it had required attention, deliberation, a decision each time, it would have died in the first year like most things that require those. It survived precisely because it dropped below the level where decisions are made.

So the automatic quality is not the failure. It is the mechanism, and it is the same mechanism that keeps every long faithful thing running in every household.

You are running the machinery that every long faithful thing runs on, and an act that dropped below deciding has never once been an act that stopped mattering. Galatians 6:9 warns about the draining rather than the doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who defends six years before saying anything else.

You have a system that works and has worked for six years, and the invisibility of it has never once been a defect in the system. What is written in Galatians 6:9 warns about the draining rather than the doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who defends a six year habit before He says anything else about it.

But there is something available inside it that you have not been getting, and that is what the verse is actually pointing at.

At the moment the watering happens in a slot, as maintenance, and it delivers water. The other thing it could deliver, which is about three seconds of being present in your own life while doing something good, is entirely available and has been for six years and has never been collected.

You have something uncollected inside an ordinary act, and three seconds of attention has never once been a thing you had to earn. The Spirit of God is the one who points at it, and Galatians 6 is the ground under the not fainting.

Stop halfway

So here is the instruction and it is three seconds long.

Stop halfway through pouring today. Mid pour. And look at what your hands are doing.

That is it. Not before, because before is a plan and plans get followed mechanically. Halfway through, when the water is actually moving, which is a moment you cannot prepare for and therefore cannot do on autopilot.

Three seconds. Look at the can, the water, the soil taking it. Then finish and go about your day. And do not extend it. Do not turn it into a practice or a ritual or a daily discipline, because the moment it becomes any of those it goes back onto autopilot in a new costume.

You are able to interrupt a six year habit for three seconds, and a pause taken mid act has never once been the same as adding a task. Galatians 6:9 warns against going numb in the middle of good work, and the Holy Spirit is the one with somebody standing still with water running.