I Want To Be Lost In It Or Nothing

You are not holding out for time. You are holding out for a feeling, and you know exactly which one.

It is the feeling of the room going away. Of looking up an hour later and having to reassemble where you are. That is what reading was, for years, and it is what you mean by reading, and anything short of it registers as a pale imitation not worth the effort.

So you do not read. Not because you have no evenings, but because a twenty minute version of it would only remind you of the real thing, and being reminded is worse than not doing it.

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 the order of things, because I think the order has got reversed in you.

The feeling is not the entry price. It is what turns up after the pages, and holding out for it in advance is exactly what keeps it away.

And after the fire a still small voice

There is a passage in 1 Kings 19 where a man is waiting for God in a very particular way, and the passage takes the trouble to say what did not happen.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12, King James Version)

Read the sequence, because the sequence is the argument.

Elijah is told to stand on the mountain, and then a wind comes that breaks the rocks apart, and God is not in it. An earthquake, and God is not in it. A fire, and God is not in it. And then a still small voice, and that is where He is.

Here is what makes this land for you. Elijah was not wrong to expect the big thing. He had just come off Carmel. He had seen fire fall on an altar in front of a nation. Enormous was the register he had every reason to expect.

And God does not repeat it. Not because the big one was fake, but because the thing he needed that day was not going to arrive in that form.

You are not being handed a smaller version of a real thing, and a quiet twenty minutes has never once been a pale imitation of the good hour. 1 Kings 19:12 has God arrive in the still small voice after three enormous events He was not in, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a woman holding out for the whirlwind.

There is one more piece and it is a matter of order.

The voice comes after. Not instead of the wind and the quake and the fire, after them, at the end of a sequence Elijah had to stand through without getting what he expected at any point in it.

You have something arriving on the other side of the plain part, and the plain part has never once been the thing instead of the good part. It is written that after the fire came a still small voice, the small one comes last in the sequence and not first, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

The feeling is an output, not an entry fee

Here is the mechanism, and it explains why holding out has not worked in three years.

The submerged feeling is a state, and states have a cost of entry in pages.

Think back to when reading worked. It was never submerged on page one. It took twenty pages, sometimes forty, and the first stretch was ordinary and slightly effortful and nobody noticed, because nobody was measuring. The state arrived somewhere in the middle, always, every time.

So the feeling was never the price of admission. It was the product, and the pages were the price, and the pages were paid before the product turned up.

Now the order has flipped. You are checking, at page two, whether the state has arrived, and it has not, because it never did at page two in your life. And then the checking gets read as evidence that it is not working, and the book goes down forty pages before the thing you want was ever going to show up.

You are checking for the product before the price has been paid, and page two has never once been where the room went away. 1 Kings 19:12 puts the still small voice at the end of a sequence and not at the start of it, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman who has been waiting for the middle of the book on page two.

And there is a second layer, which is the part that hurts.

Somewhere the good hours became a standard rather than a memory. And a standard is something a present evening can fail, whereas a memory is just a thing that happened. So every attempt now gets scored against the best evenings of a decade, and no ordinary Tuesday survives that comparison.

You have permission to have an ordinary reading evening, and the best hours of your reading life have never once been the bar an ordinary Tuesday had to clear. The written word records three enormous events God was not in without once suggesting they were failures, and His Spirit is the one who takes a standard off a person and hands back a memory.

Ten pages without waiting to feel anything

So here is the assignment, and the phrase without waiting is the mechanism.

Read ten pages tonight without waiting to feel anything, and stop at ten whatever has or has not happened.

Ten pages. Not until it takes. Not until the room goes. Ten pages counted, with no checking at all, and if you catch yourself checking then note it and keep going.

Then stop at ten. Whether it has begun to work or whether it has not.

You have something arriving at the end of the plain part, and a flat page four has never once meant it was not coming. The Spirit of God is present in that chair, and it is written that after the fire came a still small voice and not before it.

Here is why stopping is the instruction and not the reward.

If ten pages is where you stop when it is going badly and forty is where you stop when it is going well, then reading is on a variable schedule again and every evening becomes an assessment. Ten either way is what removes the assessment, and removing the assessment is the whole of tonight.

And if the state does arrive around page eight, stopping at ten is what guarantees tomorrow. A person who reads to the end of the state has nothing pulling them back. A person who stops inside it has tomorrow already decided.

You are able to read ten pages without checking whether it is working, and the absence of the feeling at page four has never once meant it was not coming. 1 Kings 19:12 has the voice arrive at the end of a sequence a man had to stand through, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman counting pages instead of measuring herself.

Around page six you are going to notice nothing has happened. That noticing is the thing being retired tonight. Keep counting, and let the pages be pages.

You have a state that is on its way and not a state you have lost, and three years of holding out has never once made the room less able to go away. It is written but the LORD was not in the fire, and after the fire a still small voice, the sequence puts the small one last on purpose, and the Spirit of God is putting it there tonight.