Forty Tabs Open And Nothing Booked

There are about forty tabs open on that laptop and not one of them is a booking.

You know exactly how many hours went into them. Two nights this week. Comparing, reading, working out what the drive is like in August, reading what people say about the place with the water, opening a fourth tab to check the one thing that would decide it.

And you enjoy it. That is the part nobody says out loud. The researching is genuinely pleasant. It is the only hour of the day where you are doing something for this family that nobody is asking you about.

And then you close it, and go to bed, and nothing happens. And the next time somebody says are we going anywhere this year, you say you have been looking into it. Which is true, and which is also the problem, because you have been looking into it for three years.

I am not going to tell you the researching is a waste. It is not. You know more about what is within two hours of your house than anybody you know.

What I want to show you is the gap the research is sitting in, and how small the bridge across it actually is.

Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only

There is a line in James that gets preached at people as a rebuke, and I want to hand it to you as a description instead, because it is describing something precise.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. (James 1:22, King James Version)

The interesting phrase is the last one. Deceiving your own selves.

James does not say the hearer is lazy. He does not say the hearer does not care. He says the hearer is deceived, and that the deception is self administered, and that is a completely different accusation, and a kinder one.

Because here is the deception. Hearing feels like doing. Reading about a trip produces, in a tired man at eleven at night, almost exactly the same sensation as making progress on one. Your brain files it under looking after my family. And so the appetite gets fed, and the thing itself never happens.

You have been fed by the researching rather than by the going, and that has never once meant you were pretending to care about this family. James 1:22 puts the trouble at self deception rather than at indifference, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can show a man that pattern without turning it into a charge against him.

Then James gives the picture, a couple of verses on. A man who hears and does not do is like somebody who looks in a mirror, sees himself, and walks away and forgets what he looked like.

Notice: the looking was accurate. He genuinely saw. The information was correct and it did not survive the walk away from the glass.

You are not a man who has failed to see what your family needs, and every one of those forty tabs has ever only been you looking straight at it. It is written that the hearer sees his own face truly and then forgets it, which is why accurate information is not the missing piece, and the Spirit of God is what carries a thing from the seeing into the doing.

So the bridge across the gap is not more certainty. That is the whole point. More certainty is what you have been buying with those hours, and it does not convert.

You are able to act on less information than you think you need, and going without the last question answered has never once been carelessness. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from hearing into doing in the middle of an unfinished list, and James 1 puts the failure in the walking away rather than in the looking.

The decision is not downstream of the research

Now the practical part, and it is a reordering rather than an effort.

There has been an assumption running underneath this, never once examined, that the date comes after the decision, and the decision comes after the research. Where, then when, then book it. That is the order in place at the moment, and it is why nothing happens, because the research end of that chain has no natural stopping point.

There is always one more thing to check. That is not a flaw in you. It is the nature of the material. Every question you answer opens a smaller one, forever.

So invert it. The date first. Then the research becomes a set of answerable questions instead of an infinite one.

You are able to write a day down before a single question is settled, and doing it in that order has never once been the same thing as being reckless with your family's money. James 1:22 says be ye doers, and the Spirit of God is what gets a man's hand onto a pen at eleven at night instead of onto a keyboard.

Because look at what a date does to those forty tabs. Right now they are all live, because any of them could still be the answer. Put the fourteenth of next month on the wall and thirty of them close themselves. The question changes from where could we go, which has no answer, to what can we do on the fourteenth, which has about four.

The date is not the last step. It is the tool that makes the research finish.

You have a way to make the reading useful, and turning forty questions into four has never once required you to know more than you already do. It is written that a hearer only deceives himself, which is why the answer is a doing rather than a better search, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sits with a man while he decides in the dark.

Close every tab and write the day

So here is the assignment, and it has a physical part that matters.

Close every tab. All of them. Then write one day on the calendar before you open another one.

Do it in that order tonight, and do not skip the closing, because the closing is the whole exercise. As long as those tabs are open, the decision is still theoretically pending, and a pending decision cannot be made.

You are closing a loop that has been running for three years, and shutting it has never once meant losing the work you put into it. The Spirit of God is the one who releases a man from a search he has been unable to end, and James 1 has doing set against hearing only rather than against being uninformed.

Then the day. On the wall, in pen, where the household can see it. A Saturday, four to six weeks out. Do not put the place next to it. Just the day.

And then, if you want to research, research the fourteenth. Twenty minutes. That is what all those hours were trying to become.

You are able to give this family a day instead of an opinion, and one written date has never once been worth less than everything you have learned. James 1:22 sets the doer over against the hearer only, and His Spirit is with you while the laptop closes.