I Look At The House And Start Nothing

You stood in the doorway of that room for about forty seconds and then went and put the kettle on.

You were not being lazy. You had gone in there on purpose, with the whole afternoon free, having said to yourself on Sunday that you would deal with it this week.

And you stood there and looked at it, and something in you closed.

Not despair exactly. More like a system shutting down. Your eye went across it and started making a list, and the list was still growing after four seconds, and somewhere in there the thing became too large to enter and you turned round and made tea instead.

You have done that in that doorway probably fifteen times this year.

And here is what makes it worse: you know what to do. You have read the advice. You could recite it. The boxes, the categories, the four piles, the one in one out, the fifteen minute timer. You know all of it and none of it has ever survived contact with that room, and by now the reading has become part of the problem, because every method you have not managed to use is another piece of evidence about you.

So this article is not going to give you another one.

There is no system in it. Nothing here has steps, nothing has a name, and there is nothing you have to keep going for it to have worked.

And I want to say the honest thing about the size of it, because most writing on this subject quietly pretends the problem is your attitude.

That room is genuinely too big to do. It is not a failure of will that you cannot face it. Nobody faces a whole room. What people who have tidy houses actually do is a hundred small things over years, and the difference between them and you is not courage, it is that they were never standing in a doorway trying to lift the whole thing at once.

Every one over against his house

There is a chapter in Nehemiah that is almost entirely a list of names, and the phrase that keeps repeating is the useful part.

From above the horse gate repaired the priests, every one over against his house. (Nehemiah 3:28, King James Version)

Over against his house.

A whole city wall was down. Miles of it, burnt gates, rubble the length of Jerusalem, and it had been like that long enough that people had stopped seeing it.

And the way it went back up was this: each person repaired the stretch in front of where they lived.

Not a committee that surveyed the whole thing. Not one heroic builder. A goldsmith did the bit outside his shop. A priest did the bit by his door. And the chapter records them by name, one after another, each with their own small section, and at the end of it there was a wall.

Now notice what nobody in that chapter is doing. Nobody is standing at a distance assessing the total. Nobody is deciding where to start based on the whole. Each of them has a section that is theirs and that is the whole of what they are responsible for, and the size of the rest of the wall is not their problem at any point.

That is the piece you have been missing for a year in that doorway. You have been trying to be the surveyor of the whole wall, and the surveyor's job is unbearable and produces nothing, and God never asked anybody to hold the whole thing at once.

The wall went back up by each one doing the stretch in front of them, and nobody in that chapter was ever asked to hold the whole of it. Nehemiah 3:28 has them repair every one over against his house, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in a doorway assessing a room.

Finishing is the thing you have not had

Here is the practical half, and it is about what is actually missing.

You have not finished anything in that house in a very long time.

Think about it. Every session you have managed has ended by running out of time or energy in the middle, with the contents of something spread out and half of it dealt with. Which means every attempt has produced a mess plus a memory of stopping, and after enough of those the doorway starts closing you down before you go in, because your body has learned what happens in there.

That is not paralysis about mess. It is a learned response to a room where nothing has ever been completed.

So what you need is not a bigger effort. It is one experience of a thing being done.

And that requires the unit of work to be small enough that finishing is guaranteed. Not likely: guaranteed. Small enough that you could not fail to finish it even on a bad day, even if somebody comes in, even if you have twenty minutes and no enthusiasm.

That is what a drawer is for. Not because a drawer matters. Because a drawer can be finished, and you have not had a finished thing in that house in a year, and the finishing is the medicine here rather than the tidiness.

And this is why the whole house cannot be the unit. It is not that the house is unimportant. It is that a unit you cannot complete gives you nothing back, ever, no matter how much of it you do.

The unit of work has to be small enough that finishing is certain, and the whole house has never once been a unit anybody could complete. The written word builds a wall out of one section each, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody whose every attempt has ended in the middle.

Empty one drawer, and stop

So here is the assignment, and the last two words are the important ones.

Empty one drawer, put back what you want, and stop.

One drawer. Any drawer. The one in the kitchen with the string and the batteries, the one in the hall, the one beside your bed. Do not choose the worst one and do not choose the most useful one to have done.

Take everything out. Put it on the counter.

Put back what you want. Not what you should keep, not what a sensible person would keep. What you want in that drawer.

The rest can go in a bag and sit in the hall for a week, or go back in another drawer, or stay on the counter till tomorrow. This assignment has no opinion about the rest, and nothing here requires you to get rid of one single thing.

And then stop.

That is the instruction that makes this work, and you will want to break it, because a drawer takes twenty minutes and you will finish it and feel the small clean pleasure of a done thing and think: I could do the cabinet too.

Do not do the cabinet.

If you go on to the cabinet, you will not finish the cabinet, and the day will end in the middle of something again, and you will have taught yourself the same old lesson one more time. The whole point of today is to have one complete experience of finishing, and that is spoiled by continuing.

Stop while it is finished. Look at the drawer. Close it.

And that is the entire task. Not the first step of anything. Nothing is scheduled for tomorrow, there is no next drawer, and if you never do another one this still counted.

You are able to stop while it is finished, and today has never once been the first step of anything. Nehemiah 3:28 gives each person the stretch in front of their own house and no more, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody closing a drawer that is done.