I Cannot Leave Until I Have Checked

It is never the walk. It has never once been the walk.

It is the eleven things that have to be settled before the walk can be permitted to begin.

Has anybody had a drink. Is the back door locked. What if it turns cold. What if the youngest needs something. What if we are further away than we meant to be when somebody gets tired. Where is the phone. Where is the other key. Did I turn that off.

And each one of those is reasonable on its own, which is exactly what makes this so hard to argue with from the inside. Nobody has ever been able to say to you: that one is silly. None of them are silly.

But together they have turned a walk around your own block into a departure, and a departure needs preparing for, and preparing for it takes forty minutes, and after forty minutes there is not much left of the afternoon or of you.

So let me put something down here at the start. I am not going to tell you to stop worrying. That is not a plan, and anybody who has said it to you has already shown they do not understand the thing.

Be careful for nothing

There is an instruction in Philippians that gets quoted badly, and read properly it is one of the kindest sentences in the letters.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7, King James Version)

Be careful for nothing does not mean be careless. In the older English, careful means full of care, weighed down with it, carrying it.

And the sentence does not stop at the instruction. It immediately gives somewhere for the care to go. In every thing, by prayer, let your requests be made known. Not: stop having requests. Not: have fewer of them.

You are not being told to have less care, and you were never asked to become a person who does not think of these things. Philippians 4:6 gives the carrying somewhere to go rather than telling anybody to put it down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as being handled rather than as being told off.

And then look at what guards. Not you. The peace of God keeps your heart and mind, which means the guarding job is transferred, and the person who has been doing the guarding gets to stop.

You have had the guarding taken off you, and it was never going to be your list that kept anybody safe on a sidewalk. The written word puts a peace on sentry duty in place of a person, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a mother read that without hearing an accusation in it.

The list is doing something else

Now I want to name what the checking is actually for, because I think it will be a relief rather than an exposure.

The eleven checks are not about the risks. They are about the feeling.

You are not being kept at that door by the risks, and you were never negotiating with a list that had an end in it. Philippians 4:6 sends every request somewhere rather than asking anybody to have fewer of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman what the checking has really been doing.

Every completed check gives you about four seconds of settledness, and then it wears off, and the next one is required. That is why finishing the list never finishes anything, and why on the days the door does get opened the unease is still there on the sidewalk.

A list that worked would end. Yours does not end, which is the evidence that it was never the mechanism keeping anybody safe.

You are not maintaining your family's safety with that list, and you were never the last line of defense on a twenty minute walk. Philippians 4 hands the guarding to the peace of God, which is exactly why the Holy Spirit keeps returning a mother to a door and a key instead of a longer list.

Twenty minutes needs a door and a key, and the list is not the price of admission.

What twenty minutes actually requires

So here is the practical part, and it is deliberately blunt, because blunt is what helps here.

A twenty minute walk around streets you live on requires a key and a door.

That is the whole list. Everything else on your list belongs to a different activity: an afternoon out, a journey, a day somewhere. Those activities are real and they do need preparing for. This one does not, and the reason it has been costing forty minutes is that it has been prepared for as if it were one of those.

You are able to leave with the key and nothing else, and it has never once been neglect to carry less on a walk around your own block. The passage names the guarding as God's work rather than the parent's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman standing at her own door with an empty hand.

And if somebody gets thirsty four streets from home, they will be thirsty for eleven minutes and then home. That is the whole of the consequence, and it is survivable, and none of your children will remember it.