I Only Ever Start In January

Eleven Januaries. You could name most of them.

Each one is genuinely good for about three weeks. You are up early, you are out, you are pleasant to be around, and you have a real sense that this year is going to be the one where it holds.

Then something in February happens that is not even a proper obstacle, and it stops, and there is nothing again until the following January.

And it is September now, and you know exactly what you are doing, which is waiting.

Not consciously. You have not said to yourself that you will start in January. But you are not going to start in October, and you would not start in a week that has nothing about it, and the whole system in you is quietly holding until the next date that is large enough to begin on.

Here is what is actually going on, and it is not laziness and it is not weakness.

You need a beginning to have a marker on it. Something that separates the before from the after, so that the effort has a place to be filed. A date, a birthday, a Monday at the very least.

That is a real need and most people have some version of it. And it has cost you eleven years, because the markers only come round so often, and the version of you that starts on one is the version that also stops when the marker has faded.

Teach us to number our days

There is a prayer in Psalm ninety about time that people quote at funerals, and it is much more practical than that setting suggests.

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

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Number our days. Not our years and not our seasons. Days.

You have a prayer that works at the smallest unit available, and Psalm 90:12 has never once asked anybody to number their Januaries. The counting is of days, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to see what an ordinary Tuesday actually is.

You are able to feel why the unit matters so much here. A man who counts in years has eleven of them behind him and about thirty in front, and at that resolution one September is invisible.

A man who counts in days has this one, and it exists, and it is countable, and it is the only one currently available.

And notice what the numbering is for. That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. The counting is not for grief. It is a practical instruction: seeing the day clearly is what makes it possible to do something with it.

That is exactly what a marker does not do. A marker makes one day enormous and every other day into filler, and eleven months of filler is what you have been living in.

You are able to see today as a real and countable day, and Psalm 90:12 has never once required a date to make one of them significant. The Spirit of God is the one who teaches a man to number what is in front of him, and the psalm works entirely at the smallest unit.

What the marker is actually doing

Here is the mechanism, and it explains the February as well as the January.

A start that needs a marker is a start that belongs to the marker.

You have been beginning things that were fastened to a date rather than to a life, and Psalm 90:12 has never once tied wisdom to an anniversary. It is written that we number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who begins something in a person on a day with nothing written on it.

While the marker is fresh, it carries the thing. You are not doing it because you want to, you are doing it because it is January and January has energy in it. That energy is real and it lasts about three weeks.

Then the date fades, which dates do, and there is nothing underneath it, because nothing was ever built underneath it. The effort was resting on the calendar.

That is your February. It is not a collapse of will. It is a marker running out, and the same thing has happened eleven times because it is a structural property of starting that way.

So a start with no marker on it has a peculiar advantage, and it is the opposite of what it looks like. Nothing is holding it up, which means it has to be held up by something ordinary from day one, which means what holds it in week two is the same thing that holds it in week thirty.

You are able to begin something with nothing underneath it but an ordinary evening, and a start with no energy in it has never once been a weaker start. The Spirit of God is the one who is present on a day nobody would have chosen, and Psalm 90:12 numbers the days rather than the seasons.

Tonight, with nothing to mark it

So here is the assignment, and the day is chosen precisely because it is nothing.

Start tonight, on this ordinary evening, with somebody, and do not tell anybody it is a beginning.

You are able to start on a Tuesday in September, and the absence of a date has never once made a beginning less real. It is written so teach us to number our days, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out on a street with a man on an evening that has nothing about it.

Tonight. Not Monday, and not the first of the month, both of which are small markers and would do the same thing to you in miniature.

Take your wife or one of the children, ten minutes, out and back.

And here is the discipline, which is the whole of it: do not announce it. Nothing gets said about starting something. An announcement is a marker, made by hand, and it will do exactly what January does.

If somebody asks why, say you fancied some air.

You have permission to build something with no ceremony at the front of it, and a thing that started without a date has never once been able to be ended by one. Psalm 90:12 puts the numbering at the level of days, and the Spirit of God is the one who is at work on a Tuesday nobody will remember.