Ten Minutes Is All I Have Got

You always say only.

I only did about ten minutes. It was only to the end of the road. I only manage that twice a week now.

You have said it so many times that you no longer hear the word going in, and everybody around you has stopped hearing it too, which means nobody has ever mentioned it.

Here is what it is doing, and it took somebody outside your family to notice.

The word only is a pre emptive apology. You put it there so that nobody else has to be the one who thinks it, and you have been putting it there for about four years, and every single time you say it you file a small report against yourself.

I want to be accurate about the facts, because I am not going to pretend anything.

Ten minutes is your capacity. Not your habit, not your choice, not what you have settled for. It is what your body will do, on a reasonable day, and on some days it is six. That is simply true and this article is not going to argue with it.

And here is what your grandchildren hear when you say only, which nobody has ever told you.

They hear a woman apologizing for her own body. And they will remember it, and one of them will do it, in about forty years, and she will not know where she got it.

If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing

There is a moment in Kings where a man is furious at how small the instruction was, and it is his servants who say the sensible thing.

My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean? (2 Kings 5:13, King James Version)

My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more then, when he says to you, wash and be clean.

Naaman was not refusing to obey. He was offended by the size of what he was given.

You have a story here about a man insulted by a small instruction, and 2 Kings 5:13 has never once treated the smallness as a problem with the instruction. The servants ask their question and leave the thing exactly the size it was, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person to do the small thing without shrinking it.

You are able to see how completely the servants reframe it. They do not tell him the washing is secretly a great thing. They do not inflate it.

They say: you would have done a great thing gladly, so how much more this one, which is easier.

And the healing is not in the greatness. It never was. It was in the doing, and the size of the instruction had nothing to do with what came of it.

You are able to do a small thing without the smallness needing to be explained away, and 2 Kings 5:13 has never once made the size of a thing the measure of it. The Spirit of God is the one who does what He does through whatever He asked for, and the passage leaves the washing exactly as unimpressive as it was.

The word is doing damage on its own

Here is what I want you to see about the word, separately from anything about your body.

The apology is doing work that the ten minutes is not doing.

You have been filing a small report against yourself two or three times a week, and 2 Kings 5:13 has never once required anybody to preface an obedience with an apology. It is written that his servants asked him a plain question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who removes a habit of speech that has been quietly grinding somebody down.

Consider what happens in you when you say it. You did the thing. You went out, in a body that finds it hard, and you did the whole of what you had. That is finished and it went well.

Then you say only, and in one word the whole thing is reclassified as a shortfall, and now the report on the day is that you fell short, when in fact you spent everything available.

That has happened several thousand times. Not one of them was accurate.

And it is not humility. Humility does not require a person to misdescribe what happened. Saying I walked to the end of the road is humble and it is also true, and the word only adds nothing to it except a wound.

You are able to describe what you did accurately, and accuracy has never once been the same thing as boasting. The Spirit of God is the one who deals gently with a person's own account of themselves, and 2 Kings 5:13 leaves the small thing without a word of apology attached to it.

Say it without the word

So here is the assignment, and it is half physical and half a sentence.

Do your ten minutes with somebody, and when you tell anybody about it, say it without the word only.

You are able to remove one word from your own account of your day, and taking it out has never once made the account boastful. It is written that a great thing would have been done gladly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a woman on a path and with the same woman describing it afterward.

The ten minutes first, and take somebody with you, because this row of the site is about a household and because you have been doing this alone.

Then the sentence. Somebody will ask, because somebody always asks, and what you say is: I went to the end of the road and back.

That is the whole sentence. Nothing before it, nothing after it. No only, no just, no about, no it is not much but.

You will feel the word coming. It arrives before the sentence does. Let it come and do not say it, and you will feel exposed for about two seconds, and then it will be over.

You have a granddaughter listening to how you describe your own body, and what she hears has never once been a small thing in the long run. Second Kings 5:13 keeps the instruction plain and unembarrassed, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when an old woman says a true sentence without an apology in it.