I Keep Meaning To and the Week Goes

Tonight we are making stewed chicken with rice, and we are making twice as much as we need, and the second half has a day attached to it.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Season eight chicken thighs heavily with salt, pepper, dried thyme and any all purpose seasoning. Brown them hard in oil in a big pot, in two batches so the pot stays hot, then take them out. Cook two chopped onions and a chopped pepper in the fat for eight minutes, then four cloves of chopped garlic and a spoon of tomato paste for a minute. Put the chicken back with two cups of water, cover, and cook on low for forty minutes until it is falling off the bone and cooked all the way through with no pink anywhere. In another pot, cook three cups of rice with five cups of water, salt and a spoon of oil, lid on, lowest heat, twenty minutes. Half of it is dinner and half of it goes in containers. It feeds ten, it costs a few dollars, and it is better the second day.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the chicken.

It is Sunday night.

That is when you notice. You get to the end of a week and you think about the person you meant to take something to, and you realize that the week has gone, again, and you did not do it.

And then you decide, genuinely and sincerely, that this week you will.

And you mean it every single time. That is what makes it wear on you. If you did not care, it would not cost you anything. But you do care, and you have cared for about eleven weeks now, and the caring keeps producing nothing, and a person cannot do that for long without starting to think something about themselves.

The verse that will not let it stay theoretical

There is a line in James that is short and blunt and has no exit in it.

Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. (James 4:17, King James Version)

I want to handle that carefully, because it is easy to read as a whip and it is not one.

Notice who it is addressed to. Not to people who do not know what to do. To people who know exactly what the good thing is. That is a specific and quite small group, and anybody with a name in mind is in it, and most people are not, because most people have not identified anybody in particular.

And what the verse does is refuse to let a known good stay in the head. It will not accept an intention as a category. There is doing it and there is not doing it, and there is no third state where it sits pending indefinitely.

That is uncomfortable and it is also the most useful thing anybody could say to you, because the pending state is where you have been living, and the pending state is what has been costing you every Sunday night.

You are being handed a way out of the pending state, and God has never once counted a good intention as a delivered meal. James 4:17 addresses people who already know the good thing and refuses to let it stay theoretical, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen on a Sunday evening.

You have not been failing repeatedly, and heaven has never once graded a person eleven times for one undone thing. It is written that to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the chicken is browning.

Intentions do not have days in them

Now let me be practical, because I do not think this is a character problem and I think there is a mechanical fix.

An intention without a day attached to it is not a plan. It is a wish, and wishes get displaced by anything that has an actual time on it, which is everything else in your week.

So the meal loses every single time, not because it matters less but because the dentist appointment has a time and the meal does not.

You are not somebody whose kindness stays theoretical, and God has never once read a scheduling problem as a failure of the heart. James 4:17 removes the pending state rather than accusing the person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a day into an intention.

And the eleven weeks are not eleven failures of will. They are eleven weeks in which one item on your list was structurally unable to compete with the others.

An undelivered meal is not a verdict on how much a person cares.

You are not somebody who does not follow through, and God has never once read a scheduling problem as a failure of the heart. The passage removes the pending category rather than accusing the person, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes eleven Sunday nights off somebody's back.

You have kept that person in your mind for eleven weeks, which almost nobody does. James 4 is written to people who were confident about their plans and vague about their timing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a day into an intention.

Cook double and name the day out loud

Here is the practical part, and it has two halves and the second one is what actually works.

The first half is cooking double tonight. Same pot, same forty minutes, twice the chicken. The second half goes into containers while it is still hot, and now the meal physically exists rather than existing as a plan.

The second half is this. Before you sit down to eat, say the day out loud. Not to yourself. To somebody in the house, or into the room, or on a piece of paper stuck to the door.

Tuesday. I am taking this on Tuesday.

That is the entire fix, and it sounds far too small to work, and it works because a named day competes and an intention does not. The container in the refrigerator with a day attached to it behaves completely differently from the same container with a hope attached to it.

You are able to give this a time, and God has never once required more willpower where a decision would do. James 4:17 refuses the pending state entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes one spoken day into the end of eleven weeks.