Eleven Good Things and a Rule for Picking

The reason nothing ever comes off your week is not that you cannot decide. It is that deciding requires you to do something you are not willing to do.

Look at what a decision actually asks. If eleven things are on the list and one has to go, then choosing means placing them in an order, and an order has a bottom, and the bottom is a person.

It is the neighbor. It is the group. It is the woman on a Thursday. Whichever you pick, you have said, with your actions, that this one mattered least, and you would rather carry all eleven than say that about any of them.

So you carry all eleven.

I want to say plainly that this is not indecision and it is not weakness. It is a refusal to do something ugly, and the refusal is to your credit. The trouble is that it has no exit in it, and the week keeps going.

So here is what I want to do. I want to give you a way of choosing that never asks you to rank anybody at all.

He gives instructions by the day

There is a line at the end of Matthew 6 that gets read as a comfort and is actually a method.

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)

Read the last sentence as a unit of measurement. Sufficient unto the day. The day is the container. Not the year, not the season, not the whole arrangement. The day.

He is not saying the future does not exist or that planning is faithless. He is saying that the amount a person is given to handle is measured out in days, and that reaching past today for tomorrow's portion is reaching for something that has not been issued yet.

Which means the size of the question you have been trying to answer is wrong. You have been trying to answer a question about your whole life, in a shape that requires you to grade eleven people, and He has never once asked anybody to do that.

You are not required to rank the people on your list, and you were never handed that job in the first place. Matthew 6:34 measures out what a person carries by the day rather than by the year, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a smaller question feel like relief instead of avoidance.

There is a second thing in that verse worth having. The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

He gives the day a kind of agency. Tomorrow will handle tomorrow's items, which is a strange sentence until you notice how much of a full week is a person trying to pre-solve situations that are not in front of them yet.

The rule, and why it is not a judgment

So here is the rule, and it is going to sound too simple.

Take the thing with the nearest date.

Not the least important. Not the one you resent most. Not the one somebody would mind least. The next one on the calendar, whatever it happens to be, and cancel that.

I want you to see what this rule does, because its whole value is in what it refuses to do. It does not rank anything. It does not tell anybody they are the bottom of a list. It does not make a claim about the value of a person or a group or a season. It reads a date, which is a fact, and it acts on it.

The soul of the problem was that every available method required a verdict. This one contains no verdict at all.

You have a way to choose that costs nobody their standing, and it never once required a judgment from you. Matthew 6:34 assigns a portion by the day and leaves the rest of the calendar alone. The Spirit of God is the one who can make an arbitrary rule feel like wisdom rather than like a coin toss.

Now the objection. This means you might cancel something quite important and keep something fairly trivial.

Yes. That is correct, and it is the price, and it is much smaller than the price already being paid. One near thing moves. Nothing is graded. The other ten stay exactly where they are and nobody learns anything about where they came in an order that does not exist.

And here is the part that surprises people. A week with one thing off it is not ten elevenths as full. It is a week with a gap in it, and a gap changes how the whole week feels in a way that is out of all proportion to its size.

You have been living inside a week with no give in it, and the give has never once needed to be large. The written word measures the portion by the day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a single hour that has come loose.

What to say when you cancel it

The message is where most people lose their nerve, so let me hand you the words.

Something has come up this week, can we move it. That is the whole message.

Do not explain. An explanation invites a negotiation, and a negotiation is a place where the yes gets restored. Do not offer three alternative dates, because that is the same commitment with a different number on it. Do not apologize twice.

And do not give them the real reason, which is a full week and one thing coming off it, because that turns a small logistical message into a conversation about your life.

Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. (Matthew 5:37)

Whatsoever is more than these. The extra material is the problem. He says so directly.

You are permitted to send eight words and stop, and the extra was never something they were owed. Matthew 5:37 names everything past the plain answer as the part that causes trouble. The Holy Spirit is the one who steadies somebody in the pause after they press send.