It Takes Me Longer To Get Ready Than To Go

Twelve minutes to get ready. Twenty minutes out. And you have started to hear that ratio as an argument against yourself.

It did not used to be like that. It used to be coat, door, gone. And somewhere in the last few years the getting ready grew, quietly, a minute at a time, until it became a thing with a length to it.

Now when somebody says shall we go round to the park, there is a small calculation that happens in you before you answer. How long will they be standing in the hall. Will anybody sigh. Will one of them say it is fine, take your time, in the voice that means the opposite even when it does not.

And so you have begun saying no. Not because you do not want to go. Because the arithmetic embarrasses you.

I want to go at that directly, because I think it has been left alone by everybody who loves you, out of politeness, and politeness has let it grow.

The outward and the inward

There is a sentence in Corinthians that holds two true things at once without letting either one cancel the other.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16, King James Version)

Read what it does not do.

It does not deny the first half. It does not say the outward man is fine, or that it is all in the mind, or that a person who feels the change is imagining it. It says perish, which is a strong word, and it says it plainly.

You are not exaggerating, and you were never being asked to pretend the twelve minutes are not real. 2 Corinthians 4:16 says the outward man perishes without softening it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that be said without it becoming the whole story.

And then it puts a second sentence beside the first with a yet in the middle. Renewed day by day. Not slowing at the same rate. Not winding down in parallel. Going the other way, daily, at the same time.

You have something in you that is getting newer while something else gets slower, and it was never a single line going down. The written word runs the two directions at once and joins them with a yet, and the Spirit of God is what makes that arithmetic believable to a woman standing at a mirror.

Who is actually waiting

Now the part about the hall, because that is where the real damage is.

There is a version of those twelve minutes in your head, and in that version everybody is standing by the door being patient with you. Patient is the word that stings. Nobody wants to be the person others are being patient with.

But I would like you to check that version against the evidence, because I think it is largely constructed.

Your grandchildren are on the floor doing something. Your daughter is answering a message. Nobody in that hall has been standing to attention for twelve minutes. They have been waiting the way people wait for a bus that is coming.

You are able to test that picture against what is actually in the room, and it has never once been the real hallway that stopped you saying yes. 2 Corinthians 4 refuses to let the outward pace be the verdict on a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a constructed room back down again.

The getting ready is part of the going, and nobody has ever been charged for the time it takes.

You are not costing anybody anything they resent, and you were never the delay in an afternoon somebody wanted for themselves. The passage refuses to grade a person by the outward pace, which is exactly why the Holy Spirit keeps taking that imagined hallway away from a woman who built it herself.

Change the start time, not the person

Here is the practical part, and it is not about being quicker.

Nothing in this asks you to speed up. Speeding up is how people fall, and it puts a rush into something that should have none.

What moves is the start time. When somebody suggests going out, you do not begin getting ready when they arrive at the door. You begin when you decide to say yes.

You are able to start early instead of moving fast, and it has never once been the pace of a person that made them worth waiting for. 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts the renewing on a daily clock rather than a stopwatch, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the hurry out of a hallway without taking the going out of it.

And say yes to the thing. Say yes even when the ratio is wrong. Twelve minutes to get ready for twenty minutes out is not a bad deal for anybody in that house, and the only person who has ever run that calculation is you.