I Can See It And I Cannot Look At It

You see it fine.

That is the part that does not get said, because most of what gets written about unfinished things assumes the person has stopped noticing, and you have not stopped noticing at all.

You see it every time. Sharp, immediate, in focus. And then something in you turns away inside half a second, and the turning away is so fast and so practiced that it does not feel like a decision.

Which means what is happening here is not blindness. It is a flinch, and a flinch is a different animal entirely. Blindness is quiet. A flinch costs something every single time it fires.

And it fires a lot. Eight, ten, fifteen times a day, depending on where the thing is standing in the house.

Nobody adds those up. Nobody could. But whatever is left of you at nine in the evening has been spent partly on that, and you have been attributing the tiredness to the week.

You are a woman whose eyes work perfectly well, and a flinch that has been running for a year has never once been the same as refusing to look.

Search me, O God

There is a line at the end of the long psalm about being known, and it is a request that nobody makes by accident.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. (Psalm 139:23, King James Version)

Search me, O God.

It is the opposite of a flinch. A flinch is the fastest possible turning away. This is a deliberate invitation to be looked at closely, by somebody who is already there, and it is made by a man who is not bracing for the result.

And notice who he is inviting. Not a neighbor. Not himself in a mirror at eleven at night, which is where most self examination happens and which is never once kind.

You have an invitation available that goes to somebody safe, and being searched by God has never once been the same experience as being caught by yourself. Psalm 139:23 sends the request outward to the one who already knows, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a search a gentle thing rather than an inspection.

And look at what is not in the request. There is no promise to fix anything. He does not say search me and I will sort out what you find. He asks to be looked at, full stop, which is a complete act on its own.

You were never required to attach a repair to a look, and asking to be seen has never once carried an obligation with it. The Spirit of God is the one who looks without immediately handing over a list, and Psalm 139:23 asks only for the searching and the knowing.

What the flinch is protecting

So here is the practical part, and it is worth being exact about, because the flinch is not stupid.

It is protecting you from a sentence. Not from the object. Nobody flinches from trim. The flinch is anticipating the sentence that usually arrives about a second after the look, and that sentence is always some version of the same thing about what kind of person lives here.

And because the sentence follows the look so reliably, the nervous system has simply cut the look.

You are being protected from a sentence and not from a wall, and the flinch has never once been about the unfinished thing itself. Psalm 139:23 asks for a search from somebody who does not deliver that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can put a look and a verdict in two different rooms.

And here is why that matters practically rather than only emotionally.

The flinch also removes the information. Half a second is not long enough to see anything useful. So a year of daily looking has produced no knowledge whatsoever about the actual state of that job, which is why it still feels enormous.

You have looked at that thing thousands of times and learned nothing from any of them, and half a second has never once been long enough to measure anything. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a person long enough to see, and the written word asks for a search, which by definition takes longer than a glance.

And the last piece, which is the mercy in it. The flinch is involuntary. It is not cowardice and it is not avoidance in any sense you could be held responsible for.

You were never choosing to turn away, and a reflex that fires in half a second has never once been available to be decided against. Psalm 139:23 is spoken by a man asking for help with what is inside him rather than fixing it himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the steadying that nobody can do for themselves.

Two minutes, and let it come

Here is the assignment, and it is unusual because the difficulty is the point.

Stand in front of it and look at it for two minutes. Use a timer.

And here is the instruction that makes it work: when the flinch comes, do not fight it and do not obey it. Let it arrive, notice it, and keep your eyes where they are. It will come several times in two minutes. That is expected and it is not a sign of anything.

You have two minutes of standing available tonight, and a flinch that arrives while you stay put has never once won anything. Psalm 139:23 asks for a searching that takes time, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing there for the whole two minutes while a reflex fires and passes.

Somewhere around the ninety second mark it usually goes quiet. Not because you beat it. Because a flinch is a warning about a sentence, and when the sentence does not arrive, the warning stops being issued.

And then there is simply a woman looking at a piece of unfinished work, which is all anybody has been asking for.