I Cannot Finish Anything With Them Here

You started four things today and finished none of them.

Not because any of them was hard. Because each one got about ninety seconds before somebody needed something, and then the ninety seconds turned into a different activity entirely, and by the time you came back to the first thing the reason for doing it had gone.

That happens between about eleven and fifteen times a day at the moment. Somebody has counted this properly in an actual study, and the number for a household with small children in it is enormous, and it is not you.

So the conclusion you have reached, entirely reasonably, is that nothing can be done in this house until they are older.

And I want to look at that conclusion, because it contains something true and something that is doing you harm.

The true part: sustained attention is not available to you at this stage of your life. That is accurate and it is not going to change for a while and no amount of getting up earlier fixes it.

The harmful part: therefore nothing counts unless it is finished.

That second one is not true and it was never stated by anybody, and it is why four started things feel like a failed day rather than like a day in which four things got moved.

Tonight we are going to change what counts.

Many coming and going

There is a moment in Mark where the Lord tries to get His own people some rest and the reason He gives is worth reading twice.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

Many coming and going. They had no leisure so much as to eat.

That is not a description of laziness or of poor organization. It is a description of interruption, recorded in Scripture, about the people closest to Jesus, in the middle of doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

You are living in a set of conditions Scripture describes without a word of criticism, and constant interruption has never once been evidence of anything wrong in the one being interrupted. Mark 6:31 names the many coming and going as the actual situation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a woman who started four things today.

Now notice what the Lord does about it, because it is not what most advice does.

He does not tell them to manage it better. He does not suggest a system. He acknowledges the conditions as real and then works with them, and the thing He offers is not more discipline but a short rest.

The conditions are not treated as a failure to be corrected. They are treated as facts.

You have a situation that God treats as a fact rather than a fault, and an interrupted day has never once been a badly run one. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the conditions of a life seriously, and it is written in Mark 6:31 that there were many coming and going and He did not blame anybody for it.

Changing what counts

Now the practical part, which is the whole of the second half.

Twenty minutes with six interruptions in it is still twenty minutes.

That sentence sounds obvious and it is the opposite of how it currently feels. At the moment, an interruption ends the session. Somebody needs something, you go, and when you come back the thing is over and it has become another unfinished item.

We are going to change the accounting.

You are able to change what counts as a session rather than what happens in one, and an interruption has never once been able to end something it was included in. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a day made of pieces, and Mark 6:31 records the coming and going as the setting rather than the problem.

Here is how it works, and it is one rule.

The timer runs for twenty minutes. It does not stop when you do. If somebody needs something at minute four, you go, and then you come back, and the timer is at minute eleven, and you carry on until it goes.

You will get maybe eleven of the twenty. Sometimes six. Occasionally, astonishingly, eighteen.

And every one of those is a completed session, because the session was twenty minutes on a clock and not a job with an end.

You are running a session that cannot be ended by a child, and a completed twenty minutes has never once required all twenty to be spent in the room. The Spirit of God is the one at work in the pieces of an interrupted afternoon, and it is written in Mark 6:31 that they had no leisure so much as to eat and He did not treat that as a failure.

And this, plainly, in these words. That house is not a report on you. Not on your competence, not on your effort, not on how well you are managing. A house with small children in it and four unfinished things is not a verdict on the mother, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while she is standing in the kitchen at four in the afternoon.

You are a woman whose worth was settled a long way from a corner of a room, and what a mother of small children has not got to has never once been a statement about who she is. Mark 6:31 records interruption without criticism in Mark 6, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the room with you.

Twenty minutes, interruptions included

So here is the assignment, and the one rule is what makes it possible.

Pick one corner, set a timer for twenty minutes, and count every interruption as part of the twenty rather than the end of it.

Pick the corner in four seconds. Twenty minutes on a timer, out loud, on a phone.

Start. And when somebody needs something, go, and do the thing, and come back, and do not look at how much time is left, and carry on until it goes.

You are able to leave a corner and come back to the same session, and going to a child has never once cost a woman the twenty minutes she was in. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in both halves of an interrupted twenty minutes, and Mark 6:31 treats the coming and going as the ordinary conditions of real work.

Then, when the timer goes, stop, and here is the part that matters most.

Say out loud, or at least think it deliberately: that was twenty minutes.

Not eleven. Not a bit of it. Twenty minutes, done, completed, one session. Because the accounting is the whole intervention, and the accounting only changes if you actually do it rather than think about it.

And tomorrow, another twenty. In the same corner, so that the pieces accumulate somewhere visible rather than being spread across four rooms.

You are counting a session as complete because it was complete, and an honest twenty minutes has never once been shortened by the people who needed you in the middle of it. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what actually happened, and it is written in Mark 6:31 that the many coming and going was the setting He worked inside.