Twenty Minutes Every Morning for Thirty Years

There is twenty minutes at the start of every day on this farm that has not changed since 1996.

It is the same twenty minutes. Water, feed, look at everything, count. It is not skilled and it is not interesting and I could do it asleep and on about four hundred occasions I have very nearly done exactly that.

Thirty years. About eleven thousand mornings, allowing for the ones I was away, which is not many.

Here is the thing I cannot do, and I have tried, because a man in his fifties tries these things at about four in the morning. I cannot point at anything and say that is what the eleven thousand mornings made.

The farm is here. But the farm would be here if some of those mornings had been done badly, and I know that, because I have done some of them badly and the farm was still here the next day. There is no monument. There is no morning where a person could have looked and said, that one, that is the morning it was all resting on.

Toby does part of it now. He does the water and I do the feed, and about a year ago he asked me a question in the dark that I have not got over, which was whether it ever gets to feel like anything.

I said no. I did not soften it, and I have wondered since whether I should have.

Then I said the other true thing, which is that it does not feel like anything and it is also the only reason there is anything, and that both of those are the case at once and a person has to hold them together without either one winning.

Bucky follows us round the whole twenty minutes every single morning, in the way a goat follows anybody with a bucket, and has done since he was small, and if there is a creature on this earth who has attended more of those eleven thousand mornings than the two of us it is him and he has never once been useful.

The least is where the sentence starts

Jesus says something short about scale and it runs in a direction people do not expect.

He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. (Luke 16:10)

The sentence begins at the small end. Not he who is faithful in much will manage the small things too, which is how a person would naturally arrange it, but the other way round, with the least as the thing that reveals the rest.

And faithful there is not a word about achievement. It is a word about being reliable over time, which is a quality that cannot be demonstrated on any single morning and can only ever be shown by a long run of them.

You are being described by something that can only be shown across a great many mornings, and Luke 16:10 makes the least the place where it is visible. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as recognition rather than as a demand.

Which is why there is no monument. Faithfulness has no single instance in which it exists. It is a shape made by repetition, and no individual unit of it looks like anything at all, and that is a fact about its nature rather than a problem with a life.

You have not failed to produce something, and the thing being described was never going to have a single visible instance. The written word puts reliability in the least rather than in a moment, and His Spirit is what makes that a relief for a man doing arithmetic at four in the morning.

What gets built out of units too small to see

There is a psalm about work that asks God for one thing at the end of it, and the request is peculiar and exact.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. (Psalm 90:17)

He asks twice. The same request, said again in the same verse in reverse order, which is what a person does when they mean it and are not sure they were heard.

And establish is a building word about making something stand. He is not asking for the work to be noticed or rewarded. He is asking for it to hold, which is the only thing a person who has done eleven thousand of something actually wants.

You are able to ask for the work to stand rather than to be seen. Psalm 90:17 asks for establishing twice and never once asks for recognition, and the Spirit of God is what makes that the better request.

And the psalm before that request is the one about a lifetime being seventy years, which means the man asking has already done the arithmetic on how short the whole thing is.

You have been given a request that fits inside a short life. Psalm 90:10 counts the years before Psalm 90:17 asks for anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a psalm into a yard at first light.