The Plan Is Still On My Phone

It is a good plan.

That is what makes this particular one hurt. It was not scribbled. You sat down over two or three evenings and worked it out properly. Measurements. An order of operations. What had to happen before what. There are photographs in there and there is a sketch and there is a list.

And then it went into a folder on your phone and the folder has not been opened since the August before last.

The plan is still good, by the way. Nothing in it has expired. The measurements are still the measurements.

But here is what happened, and it happens to careful men in particular. Making the plan felt exactly like doing the work. Same concentration, same satisfaction, same tiredness at the end of the evening, same sense of something accomplished.

And because it delivered all of that, it closed the matter. You did not stop halfway through the job. You finished a job. It was simply a different job from the one in the yard.

You are a man holding a good plan and not a failed one, and two summers in a folder has never once made the work in it untrue.

Write the vision, and make it plain

There is a moment in Habakkuk where a man is told to write something down, and the instruction comes with a reason attached to it.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. (Habakkuk 2:2, King James Version)

That he may run that readeth it.

The writing is commanded. Nobody is being told that planning is a waste of time and nobody in this article is going to tell you that either. Write it. Make it plain. That is an instruction and it is a good one.

But look at the purpose clause bolted onto the end of it, because the purpose clause is the whole thing. The writing exists so that somebody can run. It is not the destination. It is a set of instructions to a runner.

You have a plan that was always a set of instructions to a runner, and writing it down has never once been the same act as running. Habakkuk 2:2 attaches the running to the writing in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a good plan pointed at the thing it was made for.

And notice the phrase make it plain. Plain, so it can be read at speed, by somebody moving.

That is a detail about usability. A plan that is too elaborate to act on has stopped being plain, whatever else it is, and a folder that never gets opened is the least plain document there is.

You were told to make it plain so it could be used in motion, and a careful plan has never once been improved by being kept somewhere safe. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a written thing back into a man's hands, and Habakkuk 2:2 puts the running in the same breath as the writing.

Why the folder stays shut

So here is the practical part, and it is not laziness, and I want to be exact about it.

The folder is shut because opening it costs something specific. Opening it means meeting a version of yourself who was doing well. That man had energy and a clear evening and he thought this was going to happen in the fall.

Meeting him is uncomfortable, and the discomfort arrives in the first half second, which is well before any thinking gets done. So the folder stays shut, and the shutting is not a decision, it is a flinch.

You are flinching from a document and not from a job, and a flinch that lands in half a second has never once been a considered choice. Habakkuk 2:2 hands the writing over as something to run with, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man when he opens a folder he has been walking around.

And here is the second thing, which is better news than it sounds.

That version of you was not wrong. He was right about the measurements. He was right about the order. Everything he wrote is still usable, and the only thing he got wrong was the timing, and timing is the easiest of all of it to be wrong about.

You have a plan whose author got almost everything right, and a mistaken timeline has never once invalidated the work underneath it. The Spirit of God is the one who separates a bad estimate from a bad plan, and the written word commands the writing and then sends it out to be run with.

Open it and do the smallest line in it

Here is the assignment, and it is designed to be finished tonight.

Open the folder. That is the first half and it is most of the difficulty.

Then read one line of it out loud. Your own words, in your own voice, two summers later. Just one line.

You have your own writing waiting in there for you, and a plan left for two summers has never once become somebody else's work. Habakkuk 2:2 says write the vision and make it plain that he may run that readeth it, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing beside a man reading his own list out loud in a quiet kitchen.

You have a smallest item sitting in there somewhere, and the first thing on a list has never once been the one a man has to start with. So find the smallest thing on it and do that one. Habakkuk 2:2 sends the writing out to somebody moving, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a four minute job count as running.

There will be something in there that takes four minutes, because careful plans always contain a couple of trivial items, and a careful man always lists them. Find it and do it tonight and cross it off.

That is a line moving from the plan into the yard, and it is the first one in two years, and it does not matter in the least that it is a small one.