It Has To Hang On Something We Already Do

Nothing new survives in this house and you have stopped taking it personally.

Four things in five years. Every one of them was free standing. Every one of them required somebody to remember it, and to decide about it, and to put it on top of an already full week, and every one of them lasted between nine days and a month.

And here is the strange part, which is the thing this article is built on.

There are about six things this family does without fail that nobody ever decided.

The Sunday phone call to your mother. The way the trash goes out on a Tuesday because your oldest does it and has done since he was eleven. The thing you all do in the car on the way back from anywhere, which you could not name and which has been happening for years.

Nobody instituted any of those. They are not on a chart. They survive weather, illness, arguments and holidays.

So this household is not incapable of keeping things. It is very good at keeping things.

What it cannot do is start things, which is a different thing entirely, and nobody has ever put those two facts side by side in front of you.

Write them upon the posts of thy house

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy about where the words go, and the placement is the whole of it.

And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. (Deuteronomy 6:9, King James Version)

And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.

Not on a tablet kept somewhere. On the posts of the house, and on the gates, which is to say on the structure that is already there and is not going anywhere.

You have an instruction that fastens the thing to the building rather than giving it a place of its own, and Deuteronomy 6:9 has never once required anybody to build something new to put it on. The words go on the posts and the gates, and the Holy Spirit is the one who attaches a practice to what a household already has.

You are able to see the engineering in that choice.

A door post is passed several times a day by every person in the house, without anybody deciding to pass it. A gate is gone through on the way to everything. Neither requires a decision, neither can be forgotten, and neither has to be maintained separately from the house.

The instruction could have been to keep the words somewhere safe and read them at a set hour. It is not. It is: put them where the traffic already goes.

You are able to put this where the traffic already goes, and Deuteronomy 6:9 has never once put the words somewhere that needed remembering. The Spirit of God is the one who fastens something to the ordinary structure of a house, and the verse names the posts and the gates rather than a shelf.

Free standing things die here

Here is the reading of it, and it explains all four.

A free standing thing needs three separate resources. It needs to be remembered, decided about, and then done.

You have a household that reliably does the third and cannot supply the first two, and Deuteronomy 6:9 has never once asked for a thing to be remembered. It is written and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who removes two of the three requirements from something.

Everything that has survived in this house arrived attached to something else. The phone call happens after Sunday lunch. The trash happens because the truck comes. The car thing happens because the car is moving.

None of those has to be remembered because the thing it is attached to arrives on its own and brings it along.

And every one of your four attempts had to be remembered, on its own, by somebody, on a busy evening, in competition with everything else, and that is the whole of why they died. It was not commitment. It was that they had to be carried, and nothing gets carried in a full week.

So the fix is not more determination. The fix is a hook.

You are able to hang this on something that already arrives, and doing it that way has never once been the same as taking it less seriously. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in what a household already does, and Deuteronomy 6:9 fastens the words to the structure of the building itself.

Find the hook and use it

So here is the assignment.

Attach the ten minutes to the one thing this family already does without fail, and never let it stand on its own.

You are able to identify the one thing that always happens here, and having it pointed out has never once meant you could not see your own household. It is written and on thy gates, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a family the hook that was already in the wall.

Pick it for reliability, not for suitability. It does not matter whether it is a good match. The trash going out is not a natural companion to ten minutes outside and it works perfectly, because the trash goes out whether or not anybody is in the mood.

Then the rule: when the hook happens, this happens. Immediately after. Not later that evening, because later that evening is a decision and a decision is the thing this household cannot supply.

Trash out. Coats on. End of the road and back, together, whoever is in. In.

And say it out loud once, in the form of the attachment rather than the activity: when the trash goes out, we go to the end of the road. That is how it gets learned, and within about five weeks your oldest will be putting his shoes on when he hears the truck, and nobody will have discussed it.

You have a family that has kept six things nobody decided, and none of them has ever once needed anybody to remember it. Deuteronomy 6:9 writes the words on the posts and the gates, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an attached thing survive what a free standing thing could not.