I Have Only Ever Had Two Settings

You have done this five times and you can name the years.

Each one goes the same way. Something starts it. You go from nothing to a serious amount inside about nine days. For three or four weeks it is genuinely excellent and you are the man you like being.

Then something interrupts it. A week away, an illness, a job that goes wrong. And you do not go back to a reduced version, because there is no reduced version. There is the thing done properly and there is not doing it, and the interruption puts you in the second category, and you stay there for two years.

Five times. 2011, 2014, 2018, 2021 and the one last spring.

Your wife has stopped commenting on the starts. She used to be encouraging about them and now she is carefully neutral, and you know exactly what the neutrality means and you cannot argue with it.

Here is the thing nobody has ever said to you, and it took me a while to see it.

You do not have a discipline problem. You have never had a discipline problem. A man who can go from nothing to four sessions a week in nine days is not short of discipline, he has an enormous amount of it, and it arrives in one enormous block and then it is gone.

What you have never had is a third setting.

A little cloud out of the sea

There is a moment on Carmel where a servant is sent to look at the sea seven times, and what he finally reports is almost nothing.

And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. (1 Kings 18:44, King James Version)

At the seventh time he said, behold, there arises a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.

Like a man's hand. Held up at the horizon, that is a thing you could cover with your palm.

You have a story here where the whole answer arrives at a size that could be missed, and 1 Kings 18:44 has never once treated the smallness of it as a disappointment. The servant reports a hand's width of cloud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in something that would not impress anybody watching.

You are able to see how badly that would have sat with you if you had been on that mountain. Six times of nothing, and then a cloud you could hide behind your thumb.

And Elijah's response is the part that matters. He does not wait for more. He does not say come back when it is a proper cloud. He acts on the hand's width immediately, and tells Ahab to get moving, and the great rain comes afterward.

He treated the small thing as sufficient to act on, which is the exact instinct you have never had in your life.

You are able to act on something that has not yet reached a size you find convincing, and 1 Kings 18:44 has never once required the sign to be impressive first. The Spirit of God is the one who begins at a hand's width, and the passage has a man moving on the strength of it before there is anything more to see.

Building the setting you have never had

Here is the work, and it is not motivational.

The third setting has to be built, and it is built by deliberately not escalating.

You have a capacity for effort that has never once been the problem, and 1 Kings 18:44 has never once asked anybody to want it more. It is written that a little cloud arose like a man's hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man steady at a size he would not have chosen.

Everything in you wants to add. That is the mechanism that has ended five attempts. Ten minutes goes well on Monday, and by Thursday it is twenty five, and by the second week it has a structure, and by week five it is the whole thing again, and then the interruption comes and there is nothing to fall back to.

So the discipline this time is not doing more. It is doing exactly the same amount tomorrow as you did today, and the same the day after, for six weeks.

That will be harder for you than four sessions a week. Genuinely harder. Anybody can push. Almost nobody can decline to.

And there is a reason for the six weeks. What you are building is not a habit exactly. It is a category in your own head that has never existed, which is the category of a thing you do at a level you could sustain while ill, or away, or in a bad month.

You are able to hold something at one size on purpose, and refusing to grow it has never once been the same as not caring about it. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a man from spending everything in the first two weeks, and 1 Kings 18:44 starts the whole rain at a hand's width.

Ten minutes, and no more tomorrow

So here is the assignment and the second half is the entire point.

Do ten minutes tonight and stop, and do not do any more tomorrow than you did today.

You are able to stop while you have plenty left, and stopping early has never once been the same thing as stopping. It is written that the servant saw a little cloud like a man's hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man turning round while he could easily go further.

Ten minutes. Take one of them with you, because a second person keeps the size honest and makes escalation slightly embarrassing.

Then tomorrow, ten minutes. Not eleven. Not fifteen because it went well. The same.

You will find this genuinely irritating by about day nine, and the irritation is the sound of the old mechanism trying to start. Let it be irritating.

You have five previous attempts that all died of enlargement, and none of them has never once been evidence that you cannot do this. First Kings 18:44 acts on a hand's width of cloud without waiting for a bigger sign, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings the rain that follows a small beginning.

Six weeks at exactly ten minutes. Then, and only then, you may consider changing something.