The Red Light Check

Idris counted on a Tuesday, for no reason, and stopped counting at nineteen because it was only half past two.

He had not set out to count. He had read something that morning that mentioned habits, and it stuck in him the way a splinter sticks, and by mid-morning he was noticing. Traffic lights. The eleven seconds waiting for a kettle. The bit at the end of a meeting where somebody is packing up. The queue. The lift. Every single gap in the day where his hands had nothing to do, his thumb had gone somewhere, and by the time he registered what he was looking at he had already looked.

Nineteen by half past two, and he had not learned one thing from any of them.

That is the part worth sitting with. There was nothing to find out. The figure at eleven was the figure at nine, because nothing had happened between nine and eleven. He was not managing anything, he was not checking for a payment, and there was no crisis anywhere near it. He was simply doing the thing his hands do when they are free.

Nobody chose this. There was no morning when Idris decided that every pause in his life would be filled that way. It arrived the way a habit arrives, which is silently, over years, one unremarkable repetition at a time, and by the time it was fully installed there was nothing left to notice, because a thing you do nineteen times before lunch has stopped being an event.

And here is the sentence that would have surprised him if anybody had said it out loud.

Ask Idris what he trusts and he will say God without hesitating, and he will be telling the truth. He is not a man performing anything. Ask him what fills the gaps in his day, in order, by frequency, and the honest answer is a different answer, and he has never once put those two answers side by side.

You know your own version. It might be an app and it might not. It might be a number you can produce from memory at any moment. It might be that the pauses in your day, the ones nobody sees, have quietly been assigned to something, and you did not assign them.

Nobody is accusing you of anything. The evidence here is not motive; it is order and frequency, and both of those are observable.

Something has been given the gaps.

Nothing has to be wrong for something to be out of place

Let me put the freeing thing first, because if I do not you will spend the rest of this defending yourself and you will not hear a word.

Looking is not sin. Knowing what you have is not sin. Being careful with what you are responsible for is not sin, and Scripture never treats a person who knows the state of their own affairs as somebody of small faith. If you arrived braced for a page that calls carefulness faithlessness, put that down. It is not true and this page will not say it.

The question is not whether you look. It is what has been given the pauses, and how often, and whether you ever chose it.

David writes a line about where his eyes rest, and it is not about avoiding a glance at anything.

Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord; for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.Psalm 25:15

Ever toward.

Not once in the morning. Not at set times. Ever, continually, as a resting position, which is a claim about where the eyes return to when nothing in particular is happening.

That is the exact territory this is about. Not the deliberate looks, which anybody can arrange, but the undeliberate ones, the nineteen, the gaps, the place the eyes go when the day leaves a space.

You have a resting position that was given to you in Christ. Not a habit you have to construct out of willpower. The written word puts the eyes ever toward the Lord as a settled direction rather than a scheduled act, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man counting on a Tuesday afternoon.

Now let me say something about the app, because it has not done anything wrong.

It is a tool. It is a good tool and it does its job, and there is nothing in this page that wants you to delete it or feel strange about opening it. The trouble is not that it exists or that you use it. The trouble is that a tool has been given something a tool cannot hold: the place your attention goes when your attention is free.

You are not being asked to become careless. The written word never scolds a person for knowing their own situation, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a man who keeps track.

And now the thing underneath, because it is not really about a screen.

A pause is where a person rests. Nineteen times in a working day, something was consulted in the place where rest goes, and rest that is spent consulting is not rest at all, which is why you finish those days tired in a way the work does not explain.

You have a place for your eyes to rest that will hold them. For he shall pluck my feet out of the net, and the reason for the looking is who is being looked at rather than what might be found. The Holy Spirit has been in every one of those pauses with you, including the eleven seconds by the kettle.