Forty Years Of Finishing Out Of Duty

You have finished every book you started since about 1985 and you could not tell anybody why that matters.

Try it. Say out loud why a book that has been started has to be finished. Not what it feels like. The reason.

There is not one. There is a strong feeling, and forty years of practice behind the feeling, and when the sentence gets said out loud in a quiet room it does not hold up for four seconds. And that is a slightly startling thing to discover at your age about something you have obeyed six hundred times.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, and no shelf of what a woman ought to have read by now. Being handed one has never once opened a book, and mostly it adds one more thing to be behind on.

And nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Being told again by a stranger returns nothing at all.

What I want to look at is where the rule came from, because it came from somewhere and it was not from God.

Somebody taught you that. They probably meant well. It was never a commandment.

After the commandments of men

There is a passage in Colossians 2 where Paul takes apart a set of rules that people were living under, and the way he takes them apart is worth watching.

Touch not; taste not; handle not; which all are to perish with the using; after the commandments and doctrines of men. (Colossians 2:21-22, King James Version)

Look at what he does with the rules first.

He quotes them, in their own voice, clipped and confident. Touch not. Taste not. Handle not. That is exactly how a rule sounds from inside: three words, no explanation, no argument attached.

And then he names them. After the commandments and doctrines of men. Not wicked. Not from an enemy. Human, and taught by people, and therefore not carrying the authority the person obeying them assumed.

You are standing under a human rule and not a divine one, and forty years of obedience have never once given a custom the weight of a commandment. Colossians 2:22 names the clipped confident rules as the doctrines of men, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a woman in a rocker with a book she does not want.

There is one more phrase in it and it is the sharpest.

Which all are to perish with the using. The rules are described as temporary and self-consuming, things that wear out in the practice of them. That is a very exact description of a rule that has been obeyed six hundred times and has never once been examined.

You have a rule that was always going to wear out, and a custom kept for four decades has never once become true by repetition. It is written which all are to perish with the using, the rules are named as temporary in the same breath as they are quoted, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

Nobody has ever asked you for a reason

Here is the mechanism, and it is the reason this has run for forty years unchallenged.

A rule that is never stated out loud is never tested.

Think about how the finishing rule has operated. It has never been announced. Nobody in your house said it. It just runs, silently, at the point where a book stops working, and it produces a feeling rather than an argument, and the feeling is enough.

Feelings do not have to be defensible. That is the whole trick of it. A rule that presents as a feeling never has to produce a reason, and so it survives indefinitely in a completely reasonable person.

And when it does get said out loud, as it just did, it collapses. Books are not contracts. Nothing was promised to anybody. There is nobody on the other side of a paperback.

You are obeying something that has never had to justify itself, and a rule with no reason behind it has never once had any claim on your evenings. Colossians 2:22 quotes the confident clipped rules and then names them as human, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman saying a rule out loud for the first time in forty years.

And there is a second layer, and it is what four decades of it has actually cost.

Every book got weighed before it was started, because starting meant finishing. So the hard ones got avoided, and the long ones got postponed, and the ones somebody praised got read out of obligation while the ones you actually wanted waited.

The rule did not make you read more. It shaped forty years of what you were willing to begin.

You have permission to begin something you might not finish, and a rule about endings has never once made anybody a better reader. The written word calls the rules doctrines of men and says they perish in the using, and His Spirit is the one who lifts a human custom off a woman who has carried it since she was young.

Put it down, and start another one

So here is the assignment, and there is no caveat attached to any part of it.

Put down the book that is not working tonight and start another one before you sleep.

Close it. Not at the chapter break, not at the end of the part, not after another thirty pages out of fairness. Where it sits, tonight.

Nobody here is going to tell you to finish this one first, or to make an exception, or to do it properly next time. It closes tonight and there is nothing to negotiate.

Then start another one, ten pages of it, before you sleep.

You are standing under a human custom and not a command, and four decades of obedience have never once made a rule true. The Spirit of God is present in that rocker, and it is written that these are after the commandments and doctrines of men, and all are to perish with the using.

Here is why tonight and not a resolution about future books.

A rule that has run for forty years is not undone by a decision. It is undone by one instance of the opposite, done once, in the body, with the book physically shut. After that the rule has a counterexample and it never fully recovers.

And ten pages of the next one, because the rule will try to attach itself to the new book immediately, and starting it casually tonight is what keeps it from doing that.

You are able to close a book after forty years of never once doing it, and one shut cover has never once been the same thing as giving up on reading. Colossians 2:22 says which all are to perish with the using, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman closing a book she does not want at seventy.

The feeling is going to arrive as it shuts and it is going to be strong. It is forty years old. It is also a feeling, and it has no reason behind it, and you have just said so out loud.

You have four decades of obedience behind you and no debt from any of it, and finishing six hundred books has never once obliged you to finish the six hundred and first. It is written after the commandments and doctrines of men, the rules are named as human in the same sentence they are quoted in, and the Spirit of God is saying it in a front room tonight.