Deuteronomy 30:11 · World English Bible
Deuteronomy 30:11 Meaning For This Commandment Which I Command You
For this commandment which I command you today is not too hard for you or too distant.
What does Deuteronomy 30:11 mean?
What a person files as out of reach was never measured, only assumed, and the assumption sets the size of a life. An estimate of difficulty hardens into a feeling of certainty, that certainty sets the state, and the state decides whether a hand ever moves toward the work.
From the Self-Help reading below.
Deuteronomy 30:11 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
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What a person files as out of reach was never measured, only assumed, and the assumption sets the size of a life.
An estimate of difficulty hardens into a feeling of certainty, that certainty sets the state, and the state decides whether a hand ever moves toward the work. Nothing is attempted, so no evidence arrives to correct the guess, and the guess becomes the horizon.
What God sets within reach a man can still file far away, and the filing is the decision, made before any effort tested it. Commandments get refused less for their weight than for a private verdict about the distance to them. Measure instead of presuming, and most of those fences turn out to be estimates; what goes with them is the excuse that made a smaller life look reasonable.
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Live Deuteronomy 30:11 today
- Take the thing you have been calling too hard and do the smallest real piece of it in the next ten minutes. Open the document, make the call, look up the actual price. You are measuring, not committing.
- Ask someone who has done the thing you think is out of reach what it actually took. Not for encouragement, for numbers. Most fences get shorter the moment somebody describes them out loud.
- When you hear yourself say I could never, catch it and finish the sentence honestly: I have never checked. Then check one fact before the day ends.
What have I filed as far away without ever walking over to see?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 64
A journey of a thousand miles begins under your feet. The distance people fear is almost always measured before a single step tests it.
Zen
The gate has no gate. The wall a student cannot pass is made of the student's estimate of the wall, and one honest step shows the difference.
Stoicism · Seneca
Seneca said it is not that we have too little time but that we waste much of it, and that many things seem impossible only because we never tried. The verdict comes first, the facts never arrive to correct it.
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