What Four Minutes Actually Sets

I want to argue with a belief you probably do not know you hold.

The belief is that four minutes is too small to be worth protecting.

You would never say it in those words. But you can see it in what happens, because a person defends what they believe is valuable, and nobody has ever defended four minutes from anything.

So the four minutes get spent, every single morning, on whatever happens to be nearest, and it does not feel like a loss because how could four minutes be a loss.

Watch what this belief does over a year. Every other quantity in a life gets defended in proportion to its size. Nobody guards a dollar the way they guard a thousand, and nobody would think less of them for it. Four minutes sits so far down that scale that it never even reaches the part of a person that decides what to protect.

And so it is the one quantity in your whole day that has never been examined. Not because you looked at it and judged it small, but because it has never once come up.

I have met people who have restructured a career over this subject and have never, in the process, thought about the first four minutes of a Tuesday. That is not carelessness. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is what I want to argue with.

Because I think the sum is wrong. Not slightly wrong. Wrong in kind, in a way that makes the number meaningless.

I want to show you why they are not four minutes.

The word is issues

Proverbs 4 has a line about the heart that is usually quoted as a warning and is actually a piece of engineering.

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23)

The word issues means outflows. Things that come out of a source. The Hebrew behind it is used of a spring or the place a river starts.

So the picture is not a safe with valuables in it. It is a source with a river coming out of it, and the instruction to keep it is an instruction about a very small place that a very large thing comes from.

That is a claim about disproportion. A spring is small. The river is not. And what is done at a spring is out of all proportion to the size of the spring, which is exactly the thing you have not believed about your mornings.

You are dealing with a source and not a segment, and it was never a fair fight between four minutes and sixteen hours. Proverbs 4:23 calls the heart the place the outflows of a life come from rather than one part among many, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a disproportion like that believable to somebody practical.

I want to give you the mechanism, because I do not want you taking this on the strength of a metaphor.

What four minutes does to sixteen hours

Four minutes does not fill any of the day. It sets what the rest of it is measured against.

Here is what I mean, and you can test it against your own experience.

If the first four minutes are a stack of demands, then the day's baseline is demand, and everything that happens afterward is assessed as either more demand or a brief absence of it. A quiet hour at eleven does not register as a gift. It registers as an interval.

If the first four minutes are something else, the baseline moves, and the exact same eleven o'clock hour is experienced differently, because it is being compared to a different thing.

Nothing in the day changed. What changed is what the day is being read against, and that gets set at the front, by whatever is at the front, in about four minutes.

You have a baseline that is being set every morning by something you did not choose, and it was always yours to set. Proverbs 4:23 puts the keeping at the source rather than downstream. The Spirit of God is the one who can show a person the size of a small place.

And this is why the four minutes never get defended. Defending is proportional to perceived value, and four minutes look like four minutes. They are not four minutes. They are the setting of the scale for everything after them.

You are holding something that has been mispriced your whole life, and it was worth this much on every morning you have already spent. Proverbs 4:23 puts the entire outflow of a life at one small guarded place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can correct a valuation a person has never thought to question.

What to put in them

Something has to go there or the nearest thing will, and the nearest thing is always the same thing.

I am going to suggest something narrower than prayer, and I mean that as a compliment to prayer rather than a substitute for it. Pray, obviously. But decide in advance what those four minutes are for, in one line, and write the line down tonight.

Not a plan. A purpose. Something like: these four minutes are for remembering who I belong to before anybody tells me who I am.

The reason to write it is that at six in the morning nobody makes decisions. They execute the decisions somebody made the night before. If the line is written, the morning has an instruction. If it is not, the morning has a vacuum, and vacuums get filled.

Thy word have I hid in mine heart. (Psalm 119:11)

Hid, meaning stored in advance. Put somewhere ahead of the moment it is needed, by a person who was not yet in the situation.

You are able to make a decision tonight that a tired person keeps tomorrow, and it was never going to be made at six in the morning. Psalm 119:11 has something stored in advance of the moment it is needed. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present when somebody writes one line down before they are tired.