I Started Counting Instead Of Looking

It started well and it started sensibly.

You wanted to know whether the family was actually going out or only saying so, and a number is the honest way to find out. So you began keeping track. How many times this week. How far round. How long it took.

And it worked, in the sense that the number went up.

And somewhere in the last few months, without any of you noticing, the walk became a thing that produces a number, and the number became the reason for the walk, and there is a difference between those two that took a while to show up.

Here is how you know. Ask yourself what you saw last Tuesday. Not how far. What you saw.

And if the honest answer is nothing, that is the whole subject of this article.

The light of the body is the eye

There is a line in Matthew about attention that is easy to read past because the wording is old.

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. (Matthew 6:22-23, King James Version)

If thine eye be single.

Single there does not mean unmarried or solitary. It means undivided. One thing at a time. An eye that is doing one job rather than two.

You are being told something about a divided eye, and it was never a rebuke of anybody for wanting to keep track. Matthew 6:22 makes the wholeness of the eye the thing that decides, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as a description rather than as a moral charge.

And notice how much is said to hang on it. The whole body full of light or full of darkness, off the state of the eye. That is an enormous weight to put on attention, and it is put there deliberately.

You have been shown that attention is not a small matter, and it was never a minor thing to have stopped seeing a road. The written word makes the single eye the difference between light and darkness in the whole body, and the Spirit of God is what gives a father back an ordinary Tuesday.

What a number does to an eye

Now let me say what actually happens when a walk gets measured, because it is mechanical and it is not a failure of character.

An eye that is counting is not looking. It cannot be. It is checking against a target, which means it is oriented forward, toward the end, and everything between here and the end is now the gap that has to be covered.

And a route is made entirely of the gap.

So the counting did not add something to the walk. It quietly converted the walk into an obstacle standing between a person and the number, and everything on it became scenery to be got past. A number is not the same as attention, and a walk that is being measured is no longer being looked at.

You are not going out with your family any less, and it was never the going that stopped. Matthew 6 puts the whole matter on whether the eye is doing one thing, which is exactly why the Spirit of God addresses the counting and not the walking.

And the children have felt it, though none of them could say so. When somebody stops to look at something on a measured walk, there is a very small pressure to move on. Nobody is unkind about it. It is just that the walk has somewhere to be, and stopping costs.

Walk with nothing measuring

So the practical part, and it is a removal.

Walk the usual route with nothing measuring anything. Nothing on your wrist. Nothing tracking. No count of how many times this week.

You are able to go out without producing a result, and it has never once been undisciplined to walk a road for its own sake. The passage puts the light of the whole body on an eye doing one thing at a time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man walking with nothing to report.

And then the second half, which is the actual test: stop wherever somebody stops. Every time. For as long as they want.

That is the thing a measured walk cannot do, and it is the thing that tells you whether the eye has come back. If stopping feels like losing something, the counting is still running, even with nothing on your wrist.

You are able to let a walk have no result, and it has never once needed one to have been worth the twenty minutes. Matthew 6:22 sets the single eye against the divided one without asking anybody to achieve anything, and the Spirit of God is the one who is standing at a wall with a father and a child who has stopped.