If It Does Not Hurt It Did Not Count

You went out for ten minutes on Sunday and came back in and felt nothing.

Not tired. Not virtuous. Nothing. And the nothing bothered you more than being tired would have, because it registered as evidence that nothing had happened.

Here is your scoring system, which you have never written down and could recite in your sleep.

A thing counts if it cost something. The more it cost, the more it counted. Effort that leaves you comfortable is not really effort; it is a pleasant activity that you are calling effort in order to feel better about yourself.

You did not invent that. Somebody handed it to you when you were about eleven, and it was probably a good man who handed it to you, and he probably said it about something worth saying it about.

And you have applied it to your body for thirty years, which means every attempt you have made has had a floor under it: it must hurt, or there is no point.

Which is why you have never been able to do a small thing, and why every attempt has been enormous, and why there have been long gaps between the enormous attempts.

So this article goes after the rule. Not around it, and not gently.

Not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh

There is a verse in Colossians about religious severity that says something startling about self imposed hardship.

Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body: not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. (Colossians 2:23, King James Version)

These things have indeed a show of wisdom in self imposed worship, and humility, and severity to the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.

A show of wisdom. That is what Paul says about the whole category of hardship a person imposes on themselves.

You have a verse that examines self imposed severity and finds it decorative, and Colossians 2:23 has never once treated the cost of a thing as evidence that it worked. The text says a show of wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a thing that looks serious and a thing that does something.

You are able to feel how uncomfortable that is, because your whole scoring system is on the other side of it.

And notice what he grants first. He does not say severity is stupid. He says it has an appearance of wisdom, which is an honest concession: it looks like the serious option, it looks disciplined, and everybody watching agrees that it is the more admirable of the two.

Then he says it is of no value for the thing it claims to address.

That is a much harder sentence than it sounds. It is not saying hardship is unpleasant. It is saying hardship is ineffective at the exact job people use it for.

You are able to stop paying in discomfort for something that was never purchased that way, and Colossians 2:23 has never once made the price the proof. The Spirit of God is the one who does the actual work in a person, and the verse leaves the severity looking impressive and accomplishing nothing.

Where the rule actually came from

Here is a thing worth doing once, and then never again.

Ask where the rule came from, because it did not grow in you.

You have inherited a scoring system you have never examined, and Colossians 2:23 has never once required you to keep a rule because it came from somebody you respected. It is written that these things have a show of wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man look at something he was handed young without dishonoring the man who handed it to him.

It was probably about work. It is nearly always about work, and it was probably true in that setting, and the man who said it had earned the right to say it.

And then it generalized, the way rules from childhood do, and it stopped being about work and became about everything, and now it applies to a ten minute walk on a Sunday, which is not what anybody meant.

You are not rejecting him by putting it down here. You are declining to apply a rule about labor to something that is not labor.

You are able to keep the man and put down the rule, and doing that has never once been disloyalty to anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who separates what was given from what was meant, and Colossians 2:23 puts self imposed severity on the wrong side of the ledger.

Ten minutes that is genuinely easy

So here is the assignment, and it is designed to be difficult in exactly one way.

Do ten minutes that is genuinely easy, and resist the urge to make it harder at any point.

You are able to do something comfortable and let it count, and the absence of any cost has never once been the absence of any value. It is written that severity to the body is of no value against the indulgence of the flesh, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man walking easily and finding it hard.

Genuinely easy. A pace at which you could talk the whole way. No hill chosen deliberately. Nothing added at the end.

And the urge to add something will arrive at about minute six, and it will feel like integrity. It is not integrity, it is the rule looking for its payment, and handing over the payment means the assignment has not been done.

Take somebody with you and talk to them the whole way, which makes cheating obvious, because you cannot hold a conversation and secretly make it hard at the same time.

You have thirty years of paying in discomfort, and none of that has never once been what made any of it count. Colossians 2:23 calls it a show of wisdom and stops there, and the Spirit of God is the one who does what severity was never able to do.

Then come in feeling nothing, on purpose, and let the nothing stand.