Now Perform the Doing of It

He is the most sincere man in the room and that is not sarcasm.

When he says he is going to do something, he means it entirely at the moment he says it. There is no performance in him. People trust him instinctively, and children like him, and he is the one who notices when somebody has gone quiet.

Three years ago he told a friend, and then told God, that he was going to start something specific for the men on his street. He described it in detail. He was not showing off. He wept a little, actually, which is not unusual for him.

It has never happened.

Not once. Not a first meeting, not a phone call, not a date pencilled in. And in those three years he has told four more people about it, each time with the same warmth, and each of those conversations felt to him like a small act of commitment.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He has started to suspect that describing it well is the thing he actually does, and that the describing has been quietly satisfying whatever the doing was supposed to satisfy.

Read how Paul handles the gap

There is a line in the second letter to Corinth about a collection those believers had been enthusiastic about a year earlier and had not completed.

Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to will, so there may be a performance also out of that which ye have.2 Corinthians 8:11

As there was a readiness to will, so there may be a performance.

Read how he treats them. He does not accuse them of insincerity. He explicitly credits the readiness to will as real, and he keeps it in the sentence as the thing to be matched rather than the thing to be doubted.

And then he says the other half. Perform the doing of it. Not feel it more. Not want it harder. Perform, which is a completion word, and out of that which ye have, which cuts off the excuse about scale before it starts.

Your willingness is credited as real rather than dismissed as talk, and 2 Corinthians 8:11 asks for a performance to match it rather than a better intention. That is what the word actually asks, not a rebuke I am delivering, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves a sincere man from describing to doing.

The describing is doing something to you

Now the plain thing, and it is the mechanism rather than a charge.

Every time you tell somebody about it warmly, something in you settles. That settling is not fake and it is not cynical. It is what happens when a person voices an intention to a sympathetic listener, and it feels sufficiently like progress that the pressure comes off.

Five conversations in three years is five releases of pressure, and pressure is what would otherwise have made you pick up the phone.

That is not a defect of character. It is a loop, and the loop is why the most sincere man in the room can go three years without a single date in a diary.

And nothing about three years of intending has ever made your heart false. Scripture keeps the readiness to will in the sentence as something real, and the Holy Spirit is not treating a sincere man as a fraud.

One complete unit

Here is the practical piece, and the word that matters is complete.

Do the smallest whole version of the thing, start to finish, this week.

Not a plan. Not a conversation about it, and this is the important part, because a conversation about it is exactly what you've done five times. One complete unit: one evening, three men, in your front room, with food, and an end time.

Complete matters more than large. A small finished thing exists in the world in a way an enormous intended thing never does, and not one of these has ever existed.

And do not tell anybody beforehand. That is not superstition. It is because telling somebody beforehand is the loop, and you already know how the loop ends.

You are able to complete one of these this week, and the willingness was never the missing part. 2 Corinthians 8:11 says perform the doing of it out of that which ye have, and the Holy Spirit is the One who puts a date in the hand of a man who has only ever described it.