I Do Not Know What Kind Looks Like

Somebody told you to do one kind thing for your body and you could not think of one.

That is not a failure of imagination. You tried. You sat there and went looking, and every single idea that came up was a strategy in disguise. Drink more water. Go to bed earlier. Take a walk. Every one of them had a plan folded inside it, and you could feel the plan, and you put each one back down.

And then you got to the end of the list and there was nothing on it that was not a system, and you concluded that you do not know what kindness toward a body looks like.

You are right. You do not. Nobody has ever shown you one that was not a strategy, and you cannot produce from nothing a category you have never been given an example of.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You went looking honestly and you rejected the strategies correctly, and you have gone at this for years and got up every time. Somebody who did not care would have taken the first idea and called it kindness.

So this page is not going to hand you a list either. That would be the same failure in a friendlier voice.

I want to show you a verse where God says what is actually required, and notice how small it is.

Why every idea is a strategy

Consider where your ideas come from, because that explains the whole difficulty.

Every source on this subject has been selling something. Magazines, plans, well-meaning friends who were themselves in the middle of a plan. So every example in your mental library arrived with a system attached, because that is what the sources were for.

You have no examples of the other kind. Not because they do not exist, but because nobody with a plain kind act to describe has ever had a reason to publish it.

You have a library with one kind of thing in it, and no absence of examples has ever once meant a category was empty. Micah 6:8 says what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse about requirement arrive on somebody who cannot produce a suggestion.

And notice what the strategies all share. Every one of them has a future in it. Drink more water is about a pattern. Go to bed earlier is about a habit. None of them is a thing you could do once, this afternoon, and be finished with.

You have been offered futures rather than acts, and no kindness has ever once required a pattern to count as one. The written word reduces the requirement to three plain things, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes smallness feel legitimate to somebody who has only been shown systems.

What doth the LORD require

Micah asks the question in a passage full of escalating offers.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8, King James Version)

Read what comes before it, because the contrast is the point. The chapter before this has somebody offering burnt offerings, thousands of rams, rivers of oil. Escalating, impressive, expensive proposals.

And the answer is three short things, none of which requires a system.

You are being asked for something small, and no impressive proposal has ever once been what was required. Micah 6 answers an escalating series of offers with three plain phrases, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an anticlimax like that land as relief rather than as disappointment.

And read the middle one. Love mercy. Not administer it. Love it, which is an affection rather than a project, and mercy in that phrase is the kind you give to somebody who cannot pay it back.

You are asked to love mercy rather than to run it, and no affection has ever once been the same thing as a system. The Spirit of God is the one who makes mercy something a woman can direct at somebody with no way to repay it, including herself, and the written word says and to love mercy.

Ask somebody, or pick the smallest

Now the part I came to say, and there are two doors because one of them will be shut.

Ask somebody who loves you what a kind thing for your body would be. Out loud, plainly. They will say something small and slightly odd and completely non-strategic, because people who love somebody are not selling them anything.

If asking is not possible today, then take your list of rejected strategies and pick the smallest one, and then strip the future off it. Not drink more water. Drink a glass of water now. Not go to bed earlier. Sit down for a bit at some point this evening.

You have two doors available and no woman has ever once needed to invent a category from nothing. The written word reduces a requirement to three short phrases with no system in any of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a small stripped-down act recognizable as the actual thing.

And here is what stripping the future off does. It converts a strategy into an act. The same item, done once, with nothing after it, is the kindness you could not think of, and it was hiding inside the list the whole time with a plan wrapped around it.

You have the thing you were looking for inside the list you rejected, and no plan wrapped around an act has ever once been the act itself. The Spirit of God is the one who unwraps one item, and Micah 6:8 is the written word underneath it, where the offers escalate and the answer is three plain things.