I Keep Thinking I Should Do Far More

You do about ten minutes, most nights.

Not every night. There are weeks that go badly. But across a month you sit down with them more evenings than you do not, and it is usually about ten minutes, and it is usually at a bad time when you are tired.

And you have never once counted that as anything.

There is a figure in your head of what a parent who is properly on top of this does, and it is an hour, and it is calm, and it is at a good time of day, and it happens every night. You have never met this parent. They are assembled out of something somebody said, a thing you read, and a look somebody gave you once.

And measured against them, your ten minutes is not a contribution. It is the least you could get away with, and it barely counts, and you have been carrying a small ongoing debt about it for about two years.

So let me put an actual number in front of you, because you have never done this arithmetic.

Ten minutes, five nights a week, is about forty three hours a year.

Forty three hours of an adult sitting beside a child while they work. Say it as one number instead of as a series of small guilty evenings, and it stops being nothing.

When thou sittest in thine house

There is a passage about teaching children that people quote at parents to make them feel behind, and read properly it does the opposite.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:7, King James Version)

When thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way.

Look at where the teaching is located. Not in a session. Not in a scheduled hour. Sitting in the house, walking somewhere, lying down, getting up.

That is a list of ordinary moments, and it is deliberately a list of moments rather than a plan. There is no timetable in that verse and no duration attached to anything.

And diligently, in that sentence, is doing something people misread. It does not mean intensively, in long blocks, at a high standard. It means with attention and repetition, which is exactly what a short thing done often is.

That verse describes something spread thin and repeated constantly across the ordinary shape of a day. It is nearer to ten minutes at a kitchen table five nights a week than to an hour of formal work on a Sunday, and it is much nearer to what you are already doing than to the parent you have been measuring yourself against.

You are doing the shape the verse describes, and it has never once been located in a long scheduled session. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the teaching into sitting and walking and lying down and rising up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a parent recognize what they are already doing.

Steady beats large, and not for the reason you think

Here is the thing worth knowing, and I am going to be careful because the honest version of this is not a promise.

The reason ten minutes most nights matters is not that it adds up to more than an occasional hour, although it does.

It is that a short thing done often is something a child can rely on. It has a shape. It is survivable, for both of you, which means it keeps happening, which is the only quality that actually matters in the long run. An hour that takes everything you have is not repeatable and will not survive a bad fortnight.

And I am not going to tell you what the forty three hours produces. Nobody knows that, and anybody who promises you an outcome for your evenings is selling you something. Your child's reading will do what it does, and there are twenty other things acting on it, and this site will not pretend that a timer at a kitchen table controls a life.

What I can say is what the ten minutes is, rather than what it will cause. It is an adult who keeps coming back to the table. That is a fact about their childhood, and it will be true whatever their reports say.

You are giving something a child can rely on, and it has never once needed to be large to be steady. The written word spreads the teaching across ordinary repeated moments rather than concentrating it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the short thing done often.

Ten minutes, and write the date

So here is the last assignment on this site.

Do ten minutes tonight, and write the date on a piece of paper.

The ten minutes you were probably going to do anyway. Nothing changes about that.

The date is the new part, and it is the whole point. On a piece of paper, kept somewhere ordinary, write today's date. Tomorrow, if you sit down, write tomorrow's date underneath.

I know how small that sounds. Here is what it does.

At the moment nothing you do is being counted, and the only tally in your head is the one that records the evenings you missed. That is why two years of ten minutes has produced a debt rather than a record. You have been keeping accounts in one direction only.

A list of dates counts the other way. In three weeks you will look at a piece of paper with fourteen dates on it, and fourteen is a real number, and it will be the first evidence you have ever had.

Do not make it a chart, do not give it a title, and do not put it where the children will treat it as a scoreboard. It is not for them. It is for the voice that has been telling you that you do nothing.

Deuteronomy 6:7 locates the teaching in repeated ordinary moments, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a kitchen table on the fourteenth ordinary evening.

You are able to start counting what you do, and it has never once been true that only the missed evenings were being recorded. Deuteronomy 6:7 spreads the work across sitting and walking and rising, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you tonight and on the fourteenth night.