I Only Read On Vacation

You read four books in nine days in August and you have read nothing since.

That is the pattern and it has been the pattern for six years. One week away, sometimes two, and inside it a woman who reads the way she used to: in the morning before anybody is up, in the afternoon in a chair, at night until it is stupid. Four books. Sometimes five.

And then the plane lands, and it stops, completely, until the following August.

Here is the thing that bothers you about it, and you have not been able to make it into a sentence. It is not that you miss reading. It is that the woman in the chair in August is clearly you, and clearly capable, and she vanishes on contact with your own house, and you cannot explain the mechanism.

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 a specific volume to the pile of things a person feels 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 August, because I think August is being read as an exception and it is actually evidence.

You do not have a reading problem. You have a container problem.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

There is a line at the front of Psalm 23 that gets read as scenery, and the verb in it is doing something much more definite than scenery.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. (Psalm 23:2, King James Version)

He maketh me to lie down.

That is not permission and it is not an invitation. It is the shepherd putting the animal down, on purpose, because a sheep will keep moving when it needs to stop and will not stop on its own judgment.

And notice where. In green pastures, which means the lying down happens in the middle of provision rather than after all the walking is done. The rest is not the reward at the end of the route. It is a stop the shepherd builds into the route.

That is what your August is, and nobody told you.

Once a year you go somewhere and the container changes, and inside a changed container the reading comes straight back. Not gradually. Immediately, on the first morning, which means nothing in you needs repairing.

You are able to lie down where you already live, and one week a year has never once been the only place a shepherd puts a person down. Psalm 23:2 has the shepherd making the lying down happen in the middle of the pasture rather than at the end of the journey, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that in a house in November.

There is a second half of the verse and it belongs to this too.

He leadeth me beside the still waters. Still water is not a place a sheep finds. Sheep avoid moving water and will not drink from it, and the shepherd's job is to bring them to the kind they can actually use.

You have a shepherd who arranges the conditions and not just the willingness, and a year of nothing has never once meant the thirst was gone. It is written that He leadeth me beside the still waters, the leading is His work and the drinking is the animal's, and the Spirit of God is arranging conditions in your own front room.

The container changed, not you

Here is the mechanism, and once it is visible the assignment is obvious.

In August, three things are true at once. Nobody in the house needs anything from you at eleven in the morning. There is no list of undone things in your eye line. And an unfilled hour has no other candidate in it.

That last one is the real engine. At home an unfilled hour has forty candidates, and every one of them is more urgent than reading, and some of them are genuinely more urgent. So reading loses the hour on merit, every single time, and nothing about that is a character flaw.

Away, there is nothing else the hour could be. So the reading gets it by default, and by default is how reading has always got its hours, in every reader's life, including the six years it happened constantly.

Reading has never been chosen over other things. It has been what happened in hours that had nothing else in them.

You are not less of a reader in your own house, and forty urgent candidates in an hour have never once meant you lost the appetite. Psalm 23:2 has the lying down made to happen by somebody other than the animal, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman who reads four books in nine days each August and none after it.

And here is the second thing, and it is why the pattern has held for six years.

August works so well that it has quietly become the plan. There is no problem to solve, because once a year the problem solves itself completely, and a thing that gets fixed annually never gets fixed properly.

So you have a working arrangement, and the working arrangement is what has prevented an actual arrangement.

You have a right to read in an ordinary week, and a holiday that works has never once been a reason to leave the rest of the year empty. The written word has a shepherd building a stop into the middle of a route, and His Spirit is the one who puts a stop into a Tuesday.

Ten pages in the chair you sit in at home

So here is the assignment, and the chair is specified for a reason.

Read ten pages tonight in the chair you sit in at home, not the one you only sit in away.

Your own chair. In your own front room, with the undone things in your eye line and the forty candidates all standing there, and ten pages happening anyway.

Ten pages. Not four books, not an afternoon, not until it feels like August.

Here is why the chair matters.

The whole of the problem is that the reading is attached to a location. Doing it in your own chair, badly, with the house making noise, is what detaches it. And it has to be done in the bad conditions rather than in engineered ones, because engineered conditions are just August again and August is already handled.

And ten pages, because that is the size that can win an hour against forty candidates. Four books cannot compete with the laundry. Ten pages does not have to compete with anything.

You are able to read ten pages with the undone things in plain sight, and a noisy house has never once disqualified a page. Psalm 23:2 says he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman in her own chair on a Tuesday in November.

You may notice, around page four, that this is nothing like August. It is not supposed to be. August is a week and this is a Tuesday, and a Tuesday that holds ten pages is worth more over a year than nine days ever were.

You have a shepherd who makes the lying down happen rather than waiting to be asked, and the calendar has never once decided when the rest is available. It is written he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, the making is His and the pasture is where He does it, and the Spirit of God is doing that here.