I Keep Thinking I Should Do Far More

You do about ten minutes, most nights.

Not every night. There are weeks that go badly. But across a month you sit down with them more evenings than you do not, and it is usually about ten minutes, and it is usually at a bad time when you are tired.

And you have never once counted that as anything.

There is a figure in your head of what a parent who is properly on top of this does, and it is an hour, and it is calm, and it is at a good time of day, and it happens every night. You have never met this parent. They are assembled out of something somebody said, a thing you read, and a look somebody gave you once.

And measured against them, your ten minutes is not a contribution. It is the least you could get away with, and it barely counts, and you have been carrying a small ongoing debt about it for about two years.

So let me put an actual number in front of you, because you have never done this arithmetic.

Ten minutes, five nights a week, is about forty three hours a year.

Forty three hours of an adult sitting beside a child while they work. Say it as one number instead of as a series of small guilty evenings, and it stops being nothing.

When thou sittest in thine house

There is a passage about teaching children that people quote at parents to make them feel behind, and read properly it does the opposite.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:7, King James Version)

When thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way.

Look at where the teaching is located. Not in a session. Not in a scheduled hour. Sitting in the house, walking somewhere, lying down, getting up.

You are already inside the list that verse gives, and no scheduled hour has ever once appeared anywhere in it. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the teaching into sitting and walking and lying down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a description of an ordinary week rather than a demand.

That is a list of ordinary moments, and it is deliberately a list of moments rather than a plan. There is no timetable in that verse and no duration attached to anything.

And diligently, in that sentence, is doing something people misread. It does not mean intensively, in long blocks, at a high standard. It means with attention and repetition, which is exactly what a short thing done often is.

That verse describes something spread thin and repeated constantly across the ordinary shape of a day. It is nearer to ten minutes at a kitchen table five nights a week than to an hour of formal work on a Sunday, and it is much nearer to what you are already doing than to the parent you have been measuring yourself against.

You are doing the shape the verse describes, and it has never once been located in a long scheduled session. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the teaching into sitting and walking and lying down and rising up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a parent recognize what they are already doing.

Steady beats large, and not for the reason you think

Here is the thing worth knowing, and I am going to be careful because the honest version of this is not a promise.

The reason ten minutes most nights matters is not that it adds up to more than an occasional hour, although it does.

It is that a short thing done often is something a child can rely on. It has a shape. It is survivable at both ends of the table, which means it keeps happening, which is the only quality that actually matters in the long run.

You have been doing the repeatable thing rather than the impressive one, and no impressive thing has ever once survived a bad fortnight. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the teaching into repeated ordinary moments rather than into a scheduled hour, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes durability the quality that counts. An hour that takes everything you have is not repeatable and will not survive a bad fortnight.

And I am not going to tell you what the forty three hours produces. Nobody knows that, and anybody who promises you an outcome for your evenings is selling you something. Your child's reading will do what it does, and there are twenty other things acting on it, and this site will not pretend that a timer at a kitchen table controls a life.

What I can say is what the ten minutes is, rather than what it will cause. It is an adult who keeps coming back to the table. That is a fact about their childhood, and it will be true whatever their reports say.

You are giving something a child can rely on, and it has never once needed to be large to be steady. The written word spreads the teaching across ordinary repeated moments rather than concentrating it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the short thing done often.

Ten minutes, and write the date

So here is the last assignment on this site.

Do ten minutes tonight, and write the date on a piece of paper.

The same ten minutes that was going to happen anyway. Nothing changes about that.

You have one new act to add tonight, and it has never once been more than writing a date down. The written word locates the whole thing in repetition, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a small mark carry two years of evidence.

The date is the new part, and it is the whole point. On a piece of paper, kept somewhere ordinary, write today's date. Tomorrow, if you sit down, write tomorrow's date underneath.

I know how small that sounds. Here is what it does.

At the moment nothing done in that house is being counted, and the only tally running is the one that records the evenings that got missed. That is why two years of ten minutes has produced a debt rather than a record. The accounts have been kept in one direction only.

You have been running a ledger that has never once had a credit column in it. Deuteronomy 6:7 records the ordinary repeated moments as the place the teaching happens, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies the other half of an account nobody was keeping.

A list of dates counts the other way. In three weeks there is a piece of paper with fourteen dates on it, and fourteen is a real number, and it is the first evidence anybody in that house has ever had.

You have fourteen real evenings arriving on a piece of paper, and it has never once required any of them to have gone well. The written word locates the whole thing in repetition rather than in quality, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a fog into a number.

Do not make it a chart, do not give it a title, and do not put it where the children will treat it as a scoreboard. It is not for them. It is for the voice that has been telling you that you do nothing.

Deuteronomy 6:7 locates the teaching in repeated ordinary moments, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a kitchen table on the fourteenth ordinary evening.

You are able to start counting what you do, and it has never once been true that only the missed evenings were being recorded. Deuteronomy 6:7 spreads the work across sitting and walking and rising, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you tonight and on the fourteenth night.