It Costs Me Something Every Morning

Somebody told you it was only paint.

They did not mean any harm by it. They probably meant it kindly, as a way of letting you off, and what it actually did was close the subject and leave you holding something you could no longer describe.

Because the thing that happens in your house every morning is not about paint.

It is about a specific amount of energy that leaves you between the bed and the front door, and it leaves in small installments, and none of the installments is large enough to name without sounding ridiculous.

That is the trap. The cost is real and the units are too small to report. Say it out loud and it sounds like a man complaining about decorating. Keep it to yourself and it goes on being paid.

So this article is going to do something quite unusual for a site like this one. It is going to ask you to count.

You are a man measuring something real, and a cost too small to mention has never once been a cost too small to be paid.

So teach us to number our days

There is a request in the ninetieth psalm that is stranger than it looks, and it is a request for arithmetic.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

Teach us to number our days.

Not teach us to enjoy them, or to fill them, or to be grateful for them. Number them. Count them. Treat them as discrete countable things rather than as an undifferentiated stretch.

And it is asked as something that has to be taught, which tells you it does not come naturally. Left alone, nobody counts. Left alone, a person experiences their days as weather.

You are being invited into a counting that scripture treats as instruction rather than as indulgence, and numbering a thing has never once been the same as complaining about it. Psalm 90:12 asks for the counting to be taught, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches a man to count what has been quietly leaving him.

And notice what the counting is for. That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

The counting is not the destination. It is the thing that makes wisdom possible, because you cannot be wise about a quantity you have never measured. A man who does not know what something costs cannot make a good decision about it, however much he wants to.

You have been trying to be wise about a number nobody has ever written down, and wisdom has never once been available on top of a guess. The Spirit of God is the one who joins the counting to the wisdom, and Psalm 90:12 puts them in that order in the same sentence.

The units are small and the total is not

So here is the practical claim, and it is arithmetic and nothing else.

Say it takes four seconds each time. Say it happens five times between waking and leaving, because there are five unfinished things standing between the bed and the front door.

That is twenty seconds a morning, which sounds like nothing, and which is not what is being spent. What is being spent in those twenty seconds is not time.

You are spending something other than time out there, and twenty seconds has never once been the unit that any of this is measured in. Psalm 90:12 asks for the numbering because a thing unnumbered stays invisible, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a small unit countable.

What is being spent is a small deduction from the account you use to decide things. Every pass takes a little of the thing you need in order to start anything at all, and it takes it before eight in the morning, and the day then proceeds on the remainder.

Which explains something that has probably puzzled you, which is why evenings after work in that house are so much flatter than evenings anywhere else.

You were never low on willingness by nature, and a man arriving at six with less than he started with is not a man who lacks something. The Spirit of God is the one who can tell a drained account from an empty one, and the written word asks for the days to be numbered rather than for the man to be judged.

And here is why the counting is worth doing even though it changes nothing on the walls. A number can be argued with. A vague heaviness cannot.

You have a vague thing in your hands that can be turned into a number tonight, and a fog has never once been something anybody could work with. Psalm 90:12 attaches the wisdom to the counting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain number a merciful thing rather than an accusing one.

Count them out loud and write the number

Here is the assignment and it takes about three minutes.

Tomorrow morning, or tonight if you would rather, walk the route you walk every day. Bed to front door. The actual route, in the actual order.

Count out loud every unfinished thing you pass. Out loud, with your voice, not in your head. One. Two. Three.

You have a route in this house that has never once been counted, and walking it with your eyes open has never once obliged you to fix anything on it. Psalm 90:12 asks to be taught to number, and the Holy Spirit is the one walking that hallway with a man counting out loud like a child.

Count everything, including the ones that feel too small to count. Especially those. The small ones are the ones that have never been on any list and they are the ones charging you most reliably.

Then write the number on a piece of paper. Just the number. Not the items and not a plan. A single figure.

Put it somewhere you will see it, not to shame you, but because a man who knows the number is a man who can be wise about it, and that is the whole of what the psalm asked for.