I Did It Myself Again Because It Was Faster

It saves about four minutes. That is the actual number and you have never sat down and worked it out because you already know.

They were doing it. Slowly, and in a way that was going to need finishing afterwards, and the whole thing was going to take three times as long as it takes you.

So you said you would do it, or you did not even say that, you just moved in beside them and it transferred, and the handover was so smooth that nobody had to have a conversation about it.

And they let it go. They always let it go. That is the part that has started to bother you, and it started bothering you about a year ago.

I am not going to tell you to stop, and I am not going to tell you which jobs to hand over at which age. That is a readiness marker and this site does not hand those out.

And I am not going to tell you it is fine. You are the one who noticed how easily it transfers.

To every thing there is a season

There is a line at the top of Ecclesiastes 3 that everybody knows, and the word underneath it is the useful one.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version)

A time to every purpose.

Purpose there is the thing being aimed at. Every purpose gets a time, which means the timing belongs to the purpose rather than to the convenience of anybody involved.

You have purposes in that house that come with their own timing, and none of them has ever once been scheduled by what is fastest. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says there is a time to every purpose under the heaven, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a kitchen where a job just transferred silently.

And a season is not a duration. It is a stretch of time with a character to it, and the whole chapter that follows is a list of pairs, and none of them is ranked above the other.

There is no efficient half in that list anywhere. Planting is not better than plucking up, and neither of them is described as the one to get out of the way quickly.

You are inside a season rather than behind a schedule, and no purpose in that chapter has ever once been valued for its speed. It is written in Ecclesiastes 3:1 that every purpose has its time, and the Spirit of God is the one who ranks by season rather than by minutes.

What the four minutes actually cost

Now let me put the two figures side by side, because only one of them has ever been run.

Four minutes saved. That is the visible number and it is real, and on the evening in question it was probably a genuine relief.

The other figure has no clock on it. It is the number of times a person is quietly shown that a job they were doing is better done by somebody else, and it is running at about three a week, and it has been running for a year.

That is not said to make you feel worse. It is said because you have been doing an arithmetic with only one number in it, which is how an obvious decision keeps getting made.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 measures by purpose rather than by minutes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts the second figure on the table.

You have been doing a sum with one number in it, and the missing figure has never once had a clock attached to it. Ecclesiastes 3:1 gives the timing to the purpose rather than to the convenience, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names what does not show up on a clock.

And here is the plain thing, because a year of this has become something.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence of impatience or of a parent who does not believe in their child.

It is a person with too little time doing the reasonable thing with the information available, several hundred times.

You have not been undermining anybody, and taking a job back to save four minutes has never once been a statement about a child. The written word gives every purpose its own time in Ecclesiastes 3:1, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to read an efficient decision as a judgment.

The handover is silent and that is the difficulty

One more thing, and it is the reason this is hard to catch.

Nothing is said. There is no moment where anybody announces that the job is being taken back. It happens in the movement of two bodies in a small space, and it is over in about a second and a half.

Which means neither of you can raise it, because there is nothing to raise. No sentence was spoken and no decision was made out loud.

You are able to see a thing that was never said, and no conversation has ever once been required for something to be noticed. It is written in Ecclesiastes 3:1 that seasons get named so they can be recognized, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a silent second and a half visible.

That is why it has been running for a year unexamined, and it is why noticing it is most of the work.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 puts a name on a time so it can be seen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a silent handover visible to the person doing it.

You are able to see something that has never been said out loud, and it has never once required a conversation to be noticed. Ecclesiastes 3:1 names seasons so that they can be recognized, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a silent second and a half visible.