He Threw Out Every Routine

He had a set time, a set place and a set way of doing it, and he had it for about eleven years.

One morning he got to the end of the whole thing and realized he had not meant a single word of it.

Not one. He had done the entire sequence, correctly, at the right hour, and been somewhere else for all of it, and he could not have told you afterwards what any of it had been about.

That frightened him more than anything had in years.

So he cleared the shelf.

All of it, in about a week. The time, the place, the sequence, the whole apparatus. He was not angry about it and he did not make a thing of it and nobody in his house particularly noticed. He simply decided that he would rather have nothing at all than have a performance, and he meant that, and he still thinks the instinct was right.

That was three years ago.

Here is what nobody warned him about, and he wants it said plainly because he has not heard anybody say it.

With nothing fixed at all, nothing happens.

Not less. Not looser. Not a freer, more spontaneous version of the same thing. Nothing. Whole weeks go by. He is not in rebellion and he has not stopped believing anything, and if you asked him he would say his faith is the most important thing in his life, and there are stretches of a fortnight where nothing has occurred at all.

And he did not see that coming, because from where he was standing three years ago, the only two options visible were a performance and something real, and he chose something real, and got silence.

If you cleared it all out to keep it honest, come in and sit down. The glasses are out and nobody here is going to ask what your practice is.

The verse that joins the two words

There is a line in the longest psalm in the book that puts two words together which everybody else keeps apart.

And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.Psalm 119:45

Liberty, and precepts, in one short sentence, joined by the word for.

That word is doing all the work. It is not: I will walk at liberty, although I seek thy precepts. It is not despite, or while, or with the exception of. It is for, which means the second thing is the reason for the first.

The freedom comes out of the form. That is what the sentence says, and it says it without embarrassment.

You are being offered a liberty that arrives through a form rather than after it is removed. Psalm 119:45 joins walking at liberty and seeking precepts with the word for, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept them in one clause rather than in opposition, which means the shelf you cleared to protect something was carrying the thing you were protecting.

The instinct was right and the diagnosis was wrong

Now let us be careful, because there is a wrong lesson here and it would send you straight back into the thing you fled.

Your instinct three years ago was right. A form you have stopped meaning is a real problem, and noticing it was honest, and most people never notice it at all. What was wrong was the diagnosis. You concluded that the form was producing the emptiness. It was not. The form was the container. The emptiness got into it the way emptiness gets into anything a person does for eleven years, and taking the container away did not deal with the emptiness, it simply meant there was nowhere for anything to be.

You removed a container in order to solve something that was never the container's fault. Matthew 15:8 has Christ quoting a people who draw near with their mouth and honor Him with their lips while their heart is far from Him, and the rebuke there falls on the distance rather than on the drawing near, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Spirit of truth and works in a person rather than in a practice, which means what went wrong eleven years in was located somewhere a shelf could not reach.

Nothing here prescribes anything

Let us be plain about what this is not, because a man who has just been described this accurately will brace for the next paragraph.

Nobody is going to tell you what shape to keep.

There is no schedule here, no method, no recommended practice and nothing about which tradition has it right. Some people flourish inside a great deal of structure and some inside very little, and this article has no opinion about which of those is better and is not going to develop one.

You are not being handed a system, and the freedom to choose your own shape is part of what is being handed back. Romans 14:5 says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, and it is written about exactly this kind of question and deliberately declines to settle it, and it is the same Spirit who leads each believer, which means whatever you put back on that shelf is yours to choose and nobody here is choosing it.