By The Time Everyone Has Shoes On

You wanted to go. That is worth saying first, because you have started to doubt it.

At about four o'clock you thought: we should get out. And you meant it. And then somewhere between that thought and the front door, the whole thing quietly died, and by the time you had found the second shoe you did not want to go any more and neither did anybody else.

So here is the thing this site is actually about, and it is not where to go.

It is the twelve minutes at the door.

Because nobody writes about those twelve minutes. Everything written about getting outdoors assumes you are already outside, and starts from there, and the entire difficulty for most families is on the near side of the front door and always has been.

Let me name what is in those twelve minutes, because naming it helps.

Somebody cannot find a shoe. Somebody needs the toilet the moment coats go on. Somebody has changed their mind. There is a negotiation about whether this counts as a walk. You are asking the same question for the fourth time in a voice you do not like. And underneath it all you can feel your own goodwill draining out of you, minute by minute, until the thing you wanted to do has become a thing you are making everybody do.

That is not a family that does not like being outside. That is a doorway.

Not by might, nor by power

There is a line given to a man facing a job much bigger than his resources, and what it takes off him is the interesting part.

Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. (Zechariah 4:6, King James Version)

Not by might, nor by power.

Might is force. Power is capacity, the resources you can bring. And both of them are taken off the table before anything begins.

Now think about your doorway, because that is exactly what you have been trying to use. Might is the raised voice at minute nine. Power is the organizing: the earlier start, the plan, the being on top of it, the version of you who would have this handled.

And what that verse says is that the thing gets done another way. Not by working harder at the door. Not by becoming a more organized person by Saturday.

I am not going to pretend that sentence was written about school shoes. It was said to a man rebuilding a temple. But the principle it states is not narrow: the work of God does not run on force or on personal capacity, and a parent grinding themselves down at a doorway on a Tuesday is using both.

You are not going to get this by force or by capacity, and it has never once been the way anything real was built. Zechariah 4:6 removes might and power before the work starts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief to somebody who has been trying to be a better organized person for two years.

Lower the cost of leaving

Here is the practical part, and it is the whole method of this site.

Do not try to increase the willpower. Lower the cost of the door.

Every one of those twelve minutes is a small cost. Nine costs is enough to defeat almost anybody at the end of a working day. So you do not need more determination. You need three fewer decisions.

Shoes by the door, tonight, while nothing is happening. That is one whole cost removed in advance, at a moment when you are calm and nobody is asking you anything.

And then let the going be bad. Let one of them wear the wrong thing. Let somebody be grumpy for the first five minutes. Let it be twenty minutes and not a proper walk. You are not trying to have a nice family outing. You are trying to get out of a door, and the outing is not the point of the exercise.

Twenty minutes badly organized counts as having gone. It counts completely. There is no version of this where it counts less because it was scrappy.

You are able to lower the cost rather than raise the effort, and it has never once required you to become a more organized person first. The written word takes force and capacity off the table before the work begins, and the Spirit of God is the one who gets a family out of a doorway.

Shoes tonight, twenty minutes tomorrow

So here is the assignment and it is in two halves on two different days.

Tonight: put the shoes by the door. All of them. That is it.

Tomorrow: go out for twenty minutes.

Not a destination. Twenty minutes, out and back, on the streets you already live on. You do not need anywhere to go, and if you find yourself researching where to go, you have been pulled off the thing that is actually hard.

And if tomorrow becomes a bad day and it does not happen, the shoes stay by the door and you go the day after. Nothing is wasted. The shoes are not a promise you broke.

Zechariah 4:6 says not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a front door with a family who are not at their best.

You are able to remove one cost tonight, and it has never once had to be the whole solution to be worth doing. Zechariah 4:6 puts the doing outside of force and capacity, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody lining shoes up in a hallway.