Everybody Has Twenty And Never The Same Twenty

Everybody in this house has twenty minutes and never the same twenty.

You have checked. More than once. You have sat with a piece of paper and gone through it person by person, and what comes back is that there is time everywhere and none of it lines up.

One is free at four. One is free at half past seven. One is free at nine and is asleep by ten. You are free at about eight twenty for about half an hour.

And the conclusion you drew is that this household cannot do this, which is a strange conclusion to draw from a page covered in available time.

Here is where the mistake sits, and it is a mistake of arithmetic rather than of effort.

You have been adding up whether the twenties overlap. That is one calculation. There is another one available and you have never run it, which is how many twenties there are in a week.

The answer to the second one is about thirty, and every single one of them is currently going unused because it does not coincide with anybody else's.

A handful of meal in a barrel

There is a moment in Kings where a woman does an inventory out loud and it is the most honest sentence in the chapter.

And she said, As the LORD thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse. (1 Kings 17:12, King James Version)

She is accurate. There is not a meal in that house.

There is a handful and a little, and she names both amounts precisely, and she is not exaggerating in either direction.

You are a mother with a handful of something, and six separate twenty minutes have never once added up to less than one shared hour. 1 Kings 17:12 has a woman count what she actually has rather than what is missing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can turn a household inventory around without any charge of faithlessness.

And notice what she was about to do with the handful.

She was going to make one small thing, eat it with her son, and that was to be the end of it. The plan was to use up the last of it and stop.

Elijah asks her to make him something first, and the handful does not run out.

You have been planning to use up an amount rather than to use it, and something small has never once been a thing to be spent and finished. The Spirit of God is the one who changes what a small quantity is for, and it is written in 1 Kings 17 that the barrel did not waste and the cruse did not fail.

And here is what matters for your page of times.

Nothing in that passage requires the amounts to be combined. She does not need to find more meal. She needs to use what is in the barrel, today, for the person in front of her.

You are able to use what is in front of you today, and a small amount used has never once needed to be added to anything. It is written that there was a handful of meal in a barrel, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the daily use of a small thing into the whole answer.

Thirty twenties a week

Now the arithmetic, and I want you to feel the size of it.

Six people. Most of them have twenty minutes on most days. That is somewhere around thirty separate windows in a week.

You have been treating all thirty as unusable because they do not coincide, which means the household is currently running at zero out of thirty.

You have thirty windows and are using none, and a stretch of time that only one person is free in has never once been an unusable stretch. The Spirit of God is the one who does an honest count for somebody who has been counting the wrong thing, and 1 Kings 17:12 has a woman name what is actually in the barrel.

And here is what happens when you use them singly.

Your four at half past seven gets twenty minutes with somebody. Your nine at four gets twenty minutes with somebody. Over a week that is five or six real evenings, distributed, and everybody in the house has been sat with.

The overlap version, if it ever worked, would produce one evening every two weeks with everybody in it.

You are able to have five of something instead of waiting for one, and twenty minutes with one person have never once been a fraction of an evening. It is written in 1 Kings 17 that the small amount was used daily rather than saved for a proper meal, and the Holy Spirit is the one who multiplies something being used rather than something being stored.

And the person who has been paying for the overlap plan is you.

Because the schedule was your job, and there was no schedule to build, and you have carried a failure that was never a failure of anybody's.

You have been failing at something impossible, and a mother who could not line up six diaries has never once been a mother who did not try. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an impossible job out of somebody's hands, and Scripture has a widow count a handful without any shame in it.

Use the next one

Here is the instruction and it is almost aggressively simple.

Use the next twenty minutes that appears, with whoever is in it. And stop trying to line any of them up.

Not the best one. The next one. Whoever happens to be free at the same moment, whenever that happens to be.

You are able to take the next window rather than the right one, and an unplanned twenty minutes have never once been a lesser twenty minutes. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in something used the moment it appears, and 1 Kings 17:12 has a handful used today rather than kept for a better day.

And do not announce a system, because a system is a schedule and schedules are what has been failing.

Do not say we are going to do this whenever two of us are free. Just do it, repeatedly, and let it be a thing that happens in this house rather than a thing that was decided.

You have something that works better unannounced, and a habit nobody named has never once been a habit anybody had to keep. The Spirit of God is the one who works in something that was never declared, and it is written that the barrel and the cruse simply did not run out.

And throw the piece of paper away. That is a real instruction.

You are able to stop running a calculation that has no answer, and a page of times that never lined up has never once been a page worth keeping. It is written in 1 Kings 17 that she had a handful and a little and named them both, and the Spirit of God is the one who does something with a house that stopped trying to solve itself.