I Cannot Decide Which Corner

You spend the evening choosing and then it is half past nine.

That is the pattern and it is worth describing accurately, because it does not look like avoidance from inside. It looks like care.

You stand in the room. You consider the corner by the window, which is the worst, and then you think about whether starting with the worst is wise, because if it goes badly the whole thing stalls. So you consider the easy one, and then you think that starting with the easy one is a way of not starting. And then you consider the one that would make the most visible difference, and then you wonder whether visible difference is the right criterion at all.

And each of those thoughts is genuinely intelligent. That is the trap. There is no stupid step anywhere in the sequence.

But the sequence has no exit. Every criterion can be questioned by another criterion, and there are about six criteria, and they can be arranged in any order, and so a person can stand in a room for an entire evening doing real thinking and arrive nowhere.

So tonight nobody is choosing anything. Tonight there is a rule, and the rule picks the corner, and the rule is arbitrary on purpose.

I will instruct thee in the way

There is a line in the thirty second psalm where God offers to do the guiding, and the offer is more practical than people usually take it.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye. (Psalm 32:8, King James Version)

I will instruct thee in the way which thou shalt go.

You are offered guidance rather than left to work it out, and standing in a room deciding has never once been the arrangement God described. Psalm 32:8 puts the instructing on Him and the going on you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a woman who has spent four evenings choosing.

Now look at how the labor is divided in that verse, because it is precise and it is not what most people assume.

He instructs. He teaches. He guides. And the person goes.

There is no clause in there about the person working out which way is best. The deciding is not listed as the human contribution. The human contribution is the going, and the going happens in a direction that has been given rather than one that has been calculated.

You have a portion in this that is going rather than choosing, and the deciding has never once been the part that was assigned to you. The Spirit of God is the one who guides, and it is written in Psalm 32:8 that the instructing belongs to Him and the going belongs to the one being instructed.

An arbitrary rule is a mercy

Now the practical part, and I want to defend the strangeness of it before I give it to you.

The rule I am going to give you is arbitrary. It has no wisdom in it at all. It does not select the best corner and it is not designed to.

That is the entire point.

A rule with reasoning in it can be argued with, and you are extremely good at arguing with reasoning, and that is what four evenings have been. A rule with no reasoning in it cannot be argued with, because there is nothing to engage.

You are able to be handed a rule you cannot argue with, and an arbitrary instruction has never once been a worse start than a reasoned one that never produced a beginning. The Holy Spirit is the one who works through something that ends a deliberation, and Psalm 32:8 assigns the instructing to God and the going to the person.

And here is the thing about corners that makes the arbitrariness genuinely safe.

They are all about the same. That is the piece nobody believes until they have done two or three. The corner by the window and the easy one and the visible one are within about ten percent of each other in terms of how much difference twenty minutes makes, because twenty minutes is the variable and the corner mostly is not.

Four evenings of careful selection were spent optimizing a factor that turns out to be nearly irrelevant.

You are able to stop optimizing something that barely matters, and one corner has never once been enough better than another to be worth an evening of choosing. The Spirit of God is the one who frees a person from a deliberation that was never going to pay, and it is written in Psalm 32:8 that He guides and the person goes.

And this, plainly, in these words. That room is not a report on you. Not on your decisiveness, not on your character, not on whether you are the kind of person who gets things done. A room where four evenings went on choosing is not a verdict on the woman choosing, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while she is standing in the doorway.

You are a woman whose worth was settled a long way from a corner of a room, and an evening spent thinking has never once been a statement about who somebody is. Psalm 32:8 puts the guiding on God in Psalm 32, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the room with you.

The corner on your immediate left

So here is the assignment, and the rule is the whole of it.

Stand in the doorway, pick the corner on your immediate left, set a timer for twenty minutes, and stop when it goes.

Immediate left. That is the rule. Not the best one. Not the worst one. The one on the left as you stand in the doorway of that room.

If the left is a wall with nothing in it, take the nearest corner to your left. If there is genuinely nothing there, then the room has been telling you something and you can go to the next one round clockwise, and that is the only permitted exception.

You are taking a corner handed to you by a rule rather than one selected after deliberation, and an arbitrary corner has never once been a worse place to spend twenty minutes. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in a beginning that nobody had to justify, and Psalm 32:8 gives the instructing to God and leaves the going to the one who goes.

Timer for twenty minutes. Start. Do not evaluate whether this was the right corner while you are working in it, and if that thought arrives, keep working through it, because it is the same thought that has taken four evenings.

Then stop when it goes.

And next time, the same rule. The immediate left of whatever room you are standing in. Because the rule is not for tonight, it is for the next twenty times, and its whole value is that it never has to be decided again.

You are handing a decision to a rule permanently rather than making it twenty times, and a rule that never has to be revisited has never once cost anybody an evening. The Spirit of God is the one present in twenty minutes that began without a deliberation, and it is written in Psalm 32:8 that He instructs and teaches and guides.