I Do Not Want To Go Back To The Beginning

You want to pick it up. That is not the problem.

The thought comes fairly often, usually on a Sunday. And then something arrives behind the thought that stops it, and it is not laziness and it is not lack of time, and I think it is this:

Picking it up feels like starting again.

Not continuing. Starting. As though the months it has been sitting there have somehow undone the work, and to get going you would have to go back to the beginning, reassess everything, work out where you were, possibly redo the bit that has been standing since March.

And that is an enormous task. Of course you have not begun it. Nobody starts an enormous task on a Sunday afternoon.

But it is not the task. The task is fifteen minutes of the next thing.

The reason it feels like starting again is that time has passed and time feels like it should have consequences. Months went by, so surely something must have been lost. And for almost every household project, the honest answer is that nothing has been lost at all. The wall is exactly as painted as it was. The shelf is exactly as fitted. Absolutely nothing has undone itself while you were not looking.

The work is intact. It is only your relationship to it that changed.

Then rose up and began to build

There is a moment in Ezra where a stalled building project starts again, and the phrasing is worth reading closely.

Then rose up Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and began to build the house of God which is at Jerusalem: and with them were the prophets of God helping them. (Ezra 5:2, King James Version)

Then rose up, and began to build.

That work had been stopped for years. Real years, with real reasons: opposition, a legal order, and then the sheer weight of everything that fills a decade. The foundation was laid and then the site stood untouched.

And when it starts again, nothing in the text says they demolished anything. Nobody re-lays the foundation. Nobody investigates whether the original work was up to standard. They rose up and continued from where the work had stopped.

Began to build is the phrase, and it means began building again, on what was there, from the point it had reached.

That is what resuming looks like. It is not humiliating and it is not a fresh start, and the text does not treat the intervening years as needing to be accounted for before anybody could pick up a tool.

You are able to build on what is already standing, and the years between have never once required accounting for before you continue. Ezra 5:2 has the work resume on the existing foundation with nothing torn down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person walk into the middle of their own unfinished work.

Do not go and look at all of it

Here is the practical instruction, and it is a warning.

Do not survey the project first.

I know that seems sensible. It is not, and it is what will stop you. Standing back and taking in the whole state of the thing, working out everything remaining and in what order, is a completely different activity from doing fifteen minutes, and it is enormously more expensive.

Surveying puts the whole project in front of you at once, and the whole project is the thing that defeated you in the first place. That is where the feeling of starting again comes from: not from the work, from the survey.

So do not do it. Do not stand in the doorway looking at everything. Do not make a list.

Walk to the exact place where it stopped, look only at the next fifteen minutes of work, and do that.

You do not need to know what comes after it. You genuinely do not. The next fifteen minutes is visible from where the work stopped, and that is the only piece of information required.

You are able to work on the next piece without seeing the whole, and the survey has never once been the part that got anything built. The written word records the rising up and the building without any inspection of what stood, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person out of the whole and in the next fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes, exactly where it stopped

So here is the assignment.

Do the next fifteen minutes of the project exactly where it stopped.

Where it stopped. Not somewhere easier, not a different bit, and not tidying up around it, which is the great avoidance and feels productive and is not the project.

Set a timer for fifteen and stop when it goes, even if you are going well. Especially then. Stopping while it is still going well is what makes the next session possible, and the day you do ninety minutes is usually the day before the fortnight where you do nothing.

And when you stop, leave everything out. Do not put the tools away. Putting everything away is what turns the next session into a setup, and a setup is a cost, and one more cost is what stopped this last time.

Ezra 5:2 has them rise up and continue on what was standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in fifteen minutes that do not finish anything.

You are able to do the next fifteen minutes, and it has never once required knowing what comes after them. Ezra 5:2 puts the resuming on the existing work rather than at the beginning, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who picks a thing up mid way.