I Decided It Three Times

Monday night you decided.

Properly. Not a leaning, not a maybe. You sat down, you looked at both of the options, and you chose, and you went to bed with it settled and slept better than you had in a week.

And on Tuesday at about six, while doing something else entirely, it opened again.

Not with new information. There was no new information. Just a thought that arrived sideways, some version of but what if, and by half past six the whole thing was standing in the middle of the kitchen again as though Monday had not happened.

And you decided again. The same way. The same answer.

And on Wednesday it came back a third time.

So there are now three decisions, all identical, and no confidence whatsoever, and a level of tiredness about this that is out of all proportion to what is actually being decided.

And that tiredness is the thing worth addressing, because it is not being caused by the difficulty. It is being caused by the repetition.

You are a woman who has decided and not a woman who keeps failing to, and a decision revisited three times has never once been a decision that was never made.

His heart is fixed

There is a line in the psalms about a settled person, and the word it uses is oddly mechanical and that is what makes it useful.

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD. (Psalm 112:7, King James Version)

His heart is fixed. Fixed as in fastened. Held in position. Not moving around.

Notice that fixed is not the same as certain. A fixed thing is not a thing that knows the future. It is a thing that has been attached to something and therefore stays where it was put, regardless of what comes past it.

You are able to be fixed without being certain, and a heart that stays where it was set has never once needed to know how things turn out in order to stay there. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has decided the same thing three times, and Psalm 112:7 describes a heart fastened rather than a heart informed.

And notice where the fixing comes from, because the verse says it in the same breath.

His heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD. The fastening is not the person gripping harder. It is the person being attached to something outside themselves that does not move.

So a fixed heart is not a strong heart. It is a tied heart. And those are two very different jobs, and only one of them is exhausting.

You are not being asked to hold this steady by your own effort, and a heart that is fastened to God has never once been a heart that had to grip anything itself. The written word puts the trusting and the fixing in the same clause, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the fastening while a woman gets on with Tuesday.

And the first half of the verse is worth having too: he shall not be afraid of evil tidings.

Tidings are news. Things that arrive. The verse is about a person who receives incoming information and is not thrown off position by it, and that is exactly the shape of what happens at six on a Tuesday.

You are receiving arriving thoughts rather than new evidence, and a but what if at six in the evening has never once been tidings that required a decision to be reopened. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a woman in position while a thought goes past, and Psalm 112:7 puts the fixing precisely where the incoming news lands.

Three decisions is one decision

Something practical, and it is about what is actually happening on those evenings.

There is one decision. It was made on Monday. What happened on Tuesday and Wednesday was not deciding, it was auditing, and the audit reached the same conclusion both times because the decision was sound.

That is worth reading twice. The repetition is not evidence of indecision. It is evidence of a decision that holds up every time it is examined.

You have a decision that has passed inspection three times in four days, and a choice that survives its own re examination has never once been a weak choice. The written word describes a heart that stays put under incoming news, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman notice that the answer has not moved.

Now, why does it keep coming back?

Because it lives only in your head, and a thing that exists only in one head has nothing holding it in place. It can be reopened at no cost, at any hour, by any passing thought, and nobody will ever know it was reopened.

The fixing in that verse is a fastening to something outside. And the small human version of that is the same: say it to somebody, and it stops being a private matter that can be quietly renegotiated at six.

You have been holding this in the one place where it cannot stay fastened, and a decision that lives only in a woman's head has never once been a decision anybody could hold her to. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence to another person into that kind of anchor, and Psalm 112:7 fastens the heart to something outside itself.

So tell somebody. In the past tense, which is the whole technique.

Not I am thinking of. Not I have more or less decided. We decided on Monday. Past tense, done, reported rather than floated.

The past tense does something a present tense cannot. It puts the decision behind you in time, and a thing behind you is much harder to stand in front of and reconsider.

You have a decision that belongs to Monday now and not to this evening, and a thing reported as finished has never once been a thing standing open in a kitchen. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a woman in position while a thought goes by, and Psalm 112:7 fixes a heart against arriving news.