Every Time I Organize It It Collapses

You have launched this four times.

The first one had a name. You will not repeat the name to anybody. There was a whiteboard involved, and there was a Sunday evening where everybody said yes, and there was a genuine sense in the room that this family was about to become a different family.

It lasted nine days.

The second one was more modest and it lasted eleven. The third one you deliberately did not name, and it still died, and the fourth one you barely got out of your mouth before you could feel the room going flat.

So now there is a specific look that happens when you clear your throat at the end of a meal. They have learned it. They love you and they brace.

And the honest thing, the thing that is actually eating at you, is not that the plans failed. It is that you have spent whatever credit you had. There is a limited number of times a family will follow a man into something new, and you have used yours on schemes.

I want to say two things about that before anything else.

The first is that every one of those four attempts was an act of love. You were not building a system. You were trying to get your people back into the same air together, and you reached for the only tool you had ever been given, which was organization.

The second is that organization was the wrong tool, and it was the wrong tool for a reason that is written down.

Not in the wind, and not in the fire

There is a passage where a prophet is told to go and stand on a mountain because God is going to pass by, and what happens next is one of the strangest sentences in the book.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12, King James Version)

After the earthquake a fire, and the LORD was not in the fire, and after the fire a still small voice.

Three enormous events happen. A wind that tears the mountains. An earthquake. A fire. All of them are exactly what a person would expect, and the text says three times that He was not in any of them.

You have been building earthquakes for two years, and the written word has never once located the thing you want inside anything that big. First Kings 19:12 puts the LORD past the fire and in the small voice instead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does His actual work at a volume nobody would have chosen.

You are able to see yourself in this if you look, and the recognition will be uncomfortable for about a minute and then it will be an enormous relief.

Elijah is on that mountain because he is finished. He has just done the single largest public event of his life, the fire on Carmel, and it worked, and it changed nothing that he wanted changed, and he is sitting in a cave asking to die.

The answer he gets is not a bigger event. The answer is that the bigger event was never where God was.

You are permitted to stop staging things, and the smallness of what comes next has never once been a sign that it will not hold. The Spirit of God is the one who works in the still small voice, and 1 Kings 19:12 says three separate times that He was not in the spectacular thing.

You have four dead initiatives behind you and every one of them was a wind, an earthquake or a fire.

Too small to be organized

Here is the practical instruction and it is going to feel like giving up.

Do not tell anybody.

You are able to begin something that nobody has agreed to, and a thing that was never announced has never once been capable of failing publicly. It is written in 1 Kings that the LORD was not in the fire but in the still small voice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who starts a real thing in a household without a launch.

You have a driveway, or a path, or a stretch of sidewalk in front of this house. After dinner, go out to it and do something physical there for ten minutes. Bounce a ball off the garage door. Walk to the corner and back twice. Move.

Alone. On purpose. Where the window is, so that the rest of the household can see it without being asked to join it.

Say nothing before, say nothing after, and answer any question about it as briefly as a person can politely answer a question.

You have removed the only thing that ever killed these attempts, and the absence of a plan has never once been the same as the absence of intent. First Kings 19:12 finds the LORD past the earthquake and past the fire, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not need a whiteboard to build something in a family.

The reason this works when the whiteboard did not is worth understanding, because you will be tempted to escalate the moment it starts working.

A plan requires assent. Assent can be withdrawn. The instant your family has agreed to something, they are now in a position to be in breach of it, and every night nobody comes is now a small failure that has to be managed by somebody, and that somebody is you.

A man in his own driveway doing something for ten minutes is not asking anybody for anything, so there is nothing to withdraw.

When somebody comes out

Now here is the hard part, and it is the part where this has historically fallen over.

Somebody will come out. Not tonight, probably. Inside three weeks, one of them will appear in the doorway and ask what you are doing, or just come and stand there.

You have about ten seconds to get that moment right, and holding steady in it has never once been a matter of willpower. It is written that the voice came after the fire and was still and small, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man from making a speech at exactly the wrong moment.

The temptation, and it will be enormous, is to seize it. To say something like, I am so glad you came out, this is what I have been hoping for, maybe we could do this every night.

Say that and it is over. Ten minutes in a driveway has just become an initiative again, with a name, and a plan, and an expectation, and they will hear the whiteboard in that voice.

So what you say is: here, take this. Or: your turn. Or nothing at all.

You have one job in that doorway moment, and it has never once been to explain what any of this means. The Spirit of God is the one who brought them out, which was not your doing, and 1 Kings 19:12 keeps the real thing in the small voice rather than in the announcement.

Then you go in when the ten minutes is up, exactly as if nothing had happened, and you do it again tomorrow.