Quieted Like A Weaned Child

Just to a stopping point. That is the sentence and she has said it every evening for years.

It sounds reasonable. It is reasonable, in the sense that finishing a section before you stop is sensible and any craftsperson would say so.

But watch what actually happens. There is always another stopping point. Each one, as she gets to it, reveals the next one, which is only twenty minutes away, and twenty minutes is nothing, and it is now ten to eleven.

She has not turned a light off on an unfinished piece in as long as she can remember.

And she noticed something this year that has been sitting oddly with her since. She was ill for a week, properly ill, and could not go into the workroom at all, and there was a half finished thing sitting on the bench the whole time.

And she thought about it constantly. Not the work. The state of it. There was a low continuous discomfort about there being something incomplete in the house, and it did not diminish over the week, and when she finally got back to it the relief she felt was out of all proportion to a piece of work.

That is when she understood that this is not about craftsmanship.

You may have your own stopping point. A completely reasonable habit whose reasonable version stopped operating some time ago, and a discomfort about incompleteness that is doing more than it should.

The child that has stopped needing

Here is one image, and it is one of the gentlest pictures in the whole book.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.Psalm 131:2

A weaned child.

Think about what that means, because the picture is precise. A baby with its mother is desperate: it needs something and it cannot rest until it has it, and everything in it is straining toward the thing.

A weaned child is with its mother and does not need anything. It is not being fed. It is simply there, resting, complete, with nothing outstanding between them.

That is the picture of the soul that is offered, and notice the verb: I have behaved and quieted myself. It is something he did, and it did not come naturally, and the tone of the psalm suggests it took him a while.

You are able to be with God and with an unfinished bench at the same time, without either being resolved. Psalm 131:2 makes the quieted soul a weaned child rather than a satisfied one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman be complete while something on the bench is not.

Now let me name what is under the stopping point, because you found it yourself during that week of illness.

Incompleteness is uncomfortable to you in a way that goes beyond the work. A thing left half done in the house produces a low continuous discomfort, and finishing produces a relief out of proportion to what was finished. That is not craftsmanship. Craftsmanship would be satisfied by good work; this is something being soothed.

I am not going to tell you what it is. I do not know, and neither does anybody who has not sat with you properly.

You are able to be quiet with something unfinished, and that quiet is a thing that gets practiced rather than felt. The written word describes a soul that has been quieted deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of the discomfort that arrives when a bench is left half done.

The honest half. Turning the light off on an unfinished piece will feel wrong, and it will feel wrong the second time as well. I am not going to tell you it will feel fine, because it will not for a while.

And I am not going to give you a schedule or a rule about hours. This is not a discipline problem and you have plenty of discipline.

There is a part only you can do and it is one action rather than a change. The light goes off tonight with something visibly unfinished on the bench. And it stays off.