I Check The Account Eleven Times A Day

You looked at it in the car. You looked at it in the line at the store. You looked at it at half past nine and then again at twenty to ten.

And nothing had changed, and you knew nothing had changed, and you looked anyway.

I want to be gentle about this, because it is not stupidity and it is not a character defect. It is a very specific kind of loop and almost everybody with uneven income falls into some version of it.

You are looking for comfort in the one place that has never once given you any, and a number checked again has never once been a number that moved.

Here is the mechanism, as far as anybody understands it.

The looking is not about information. It is about relief. Somewhere in there is a hope that this time the number will be different and the feeling will stop.

And occasionally it is different. Something clears, or something comes in, and there is a genuine hit of relief.

Which means the loop is being rewarded, unpredictably, at intervals, and that is the exact arrangement that makes a behavior hardest to stop. It is not a weakness in you. It is arithmetic.

As a weaned child

There is a psalm, three verses long, where a man describes quieting himself, and the picture he chooses is unusual.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. (Psalm 131:2, King James Version)

As a child that is weaned of his mother.

A weaned child is still with its mother. It is still being carried and still being fed. What has changed is that it has stopped demanding one particular thing at one particular moment.

You are looking at a picture of somebody still fully held who has stopped grabbing at one thing, and a quieted soul has never once been described there as a soul that got what it was reaching for. Psalm 131:2 says my soul is even as a weaned child, and the Holy Spirit is the one who chose that image rather than an image of a need being met.

And notice the verb. I have behaved and quieted myself.

It is something he did. Not something he waited to feel. There is an action in that verse and the action came before the quiet.

You have an action available rather than a feeling to wait for, and quieting a soul has never once been described as a thing that arrives on its own. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible in a person, and it is written in Psalm 131:2 as something the man himself did.

Eleven looks, and what each one costs

Let me put a real cost on this, because the looking feels free and it is not.

Each look takes about four seconds and about ninety seconds of recovery. That is the part nobody counts: the two minutes afterward where the thing sits in you and the room goes slightly far away.

Eleven of those is about twenty minutes a day of active fright, and rather more of being half absent from whatever else was happening.

You are paying about twenty minutes a day for information you already have, and a number that has not changed has never once been worth checking twice. The written word describes a man doing something to quiet himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary act of stopping possible.

And there is a second cost, and this is the one your family notices.

The looking happens in the middle of things. At the table. While somebody is talking. In the car with your children in the back.

Which means the people in your house are getting a version of you that is intermittently somewhere else, eleven times a day, and they cannot see where you have gone.

You have people in the room who keep losing you for two minutes at a time, and a phone glanced at during a conversation has never once been invisible to the person talking. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person back into the room they are standing in, and Psalm 131:2 has a soul settled rather than satisfied.

Say what came in, and put it down

So the assignment, and I am going to add one physical thing to it because this particular loop is broken with hands rather than with thoughts.

Name out loud what came in this week, however small, and thank God for it by name.

Once a week, out loud, the actual pieces. That is your real information, and it is better information than the balance, because the balance is one number and the list is the truth about your week.

You are able to say the list once rather than check the number eleven times, and a week named out loud has never once told you less than a balance stared at. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in something said out loud in a living room, and the written word puts an action in front of the quiet.

And then the hands part. Put the phone face down, on a table, in a different room from you, for one hour a day.

Not all day. One hour. The same hour, so it does not require a decision each time.

You are able to be in a different room from a phone for one hour, and sixty minutes out of reach has never once been too small a thing to begin breaking a loop with. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a decision that ordinary, and it is written in Psalm 131:2 that the man quieted himself rather than waiting to be quieted.