Forty Years and Four Weeks

He started it on a Monday in September and he gave it four weeks in his head without ever writing that down.

Four weeks is a reasonable trial for most things. It is what he gives an approach at work, and it is what he gave the last two things he attempted about himself, and both of those he abandoned in week five.

This one was a practice. A specific one, done daily, first thing, and he is not going to name it because the naming is not the point and it would turn this into a recommendation.

Week one he was interested. Week two he was tired of it and did it anyway. Week three something happened on the Thursday that he would call, if pressed, quite significant, and then nothing else happened for the rest of the week.

And in week four he sat down at the end of it and did the assessment he always does, which he would describe as being honest with himself, and the finding was: one Thursday.

He kept going into week five, but the thing that had been in it was gone, and by week seven he had stopped without stopping, in the way a person does, and he could not tell you now which day was the last one.

That was three years ago and he has thought about it more than he expected to.

Because in the spring he was reading Deuteronomy, properly, for the first time in years, and he got to a line about a length of time and put the book down.

Forty years. And a sentence afterwards telling them to remember the whole of it.

He sat there working out that if he had been in that generation, he would have filed a report in the fifth week saying that nothing was happening, and that the report would have been accurate, and that it would have been the most wrong thing anybody ever wrote.

They were told afterwards to remember the whole way

Let me be fair to the four weeks first, because you did not pick that number out of laziness.

Four weeks is a good discipline in most places. It stops a person pouring years into something that is not working, and it has probably saved you a great deal. The instinct is sound and it is not going to be taken off you here, because in most rooms you would be right.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a correction: a trial period is a tool for evaluating a method, and it is useless for evaluating a work God is doing in a person. That is not my brisk reading of a September, it is what stands written in Deuteronomy, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that verse was with you in the spring when you put the book down.

Read what Moses tells them to do about the forty years, once they are on the far side of it.

Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart.Deuteronomy 8:2

All the way. The whole of it, and the whole of it is named as leading.

Not the good stretches. Not the parts where something visible happened. The years of nothing, in a wilderness, are described afterwards as the Lord leading them, and the purpose given is to reveal what was in a heart, which is not a thing that can be seen in four weeks by anybody.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better result: what was going on in weeks four and five was not nothing, because the written word calls the whole stretch leading and the Spirit of God is the one who does the leading through the part where nothing shows.

Now let me say what your assessment actually measured, because it was accurate and it was useless, and both of those are worth understanding.

One Thursday. That is a correct count of visible events in twenty-eight days.

But you were not running a method. You were four weeks into something whose stated purpose, in the passage you put down in the spring, is to find out what is in a heart. A trial period cannot see that, because the thing being examined is the examiner, and what is written puts the knowing at the end of the forty years, with the Holy Spirit holding the instrument the whole way.

And there is something else in that verse that you have not counted. The forty years were to humble and to test in order to know. The knowing came at the end. Not during, and not in the fifth week, and not by anybody keeping a tally in a wilderness.

What is written treats the long empty stretch as the instrument, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding it, and He does not publish findings at four weeks.

And the guard, because it belongs here as much as anywhere: nothing in this says a practice is holy or that you should have kept that one, and nobody here is handing you a length. Forty is not a target. Four is not a sin. What is being taken off you is the authority of the report you filed.