The notebook with everyone's name in it

Proverbs 27:23 is about sheep.

That matters more than it sounds.

Be diligent to know the state of your flocks, and look well to your herds.

The next verse says why: "for riches are not forever." It was written for people whose whole net worth was walking around on a hillside. You couldn't check a balance. You had to go out and look at each animal, its feet and its eyes and whether it was eating.

So it's a verse about paying attention to the thing you'd otherwise assume is fine.

Some readers will want to turn it into a verse about fathers as shepherds of the home. Christians genuinely disagree about how far that picture stretches, and about who in a marriage carries it. We're not settling that here. The habit below works whoever you are in the house.

The habit

Tuesday morning. 6:40am, or whenever you're up before everyone else. Coffee and a cheap notebook. A pen, not your phone.

Write the name of every person in your house down the left margin. Then add anyone outside it you'd say you're responsible for. Your mother. The brother who stopped returning calls.

Next to each name, write one line. What is this person carrying this week?

Not how they're doing. What they're carrying. The math test on Thursday. The knee your dad won't get looked at.

Give it ten minutes. Then shut the notebook and go make breakfast.

What you'll find

Some lines will come straight away. Others won't come at all.

The blank lines are the point. A blank next to your youngest's name doesn't mean he's carrying nothing. It means you haven't looked at his feet in a while.

Pick one blank. Before Thursday night, find out. Not with an interview at the dinner table. Ask in the car, or while you're both drying dishes, sideways, the way people actually say true things.

Next Tuesday, write the list again. Don't read last week's first.

Where it goes wrong

This can tip into surveillance if you let it. The notebook is for you. It isn't evidence. If your daughter finds it and reads "worried about her friends," that's fine. If it reads like a case file, you've missed what the verse was getting at.

It also won't fix anything by itself. Some weeks you'll write the same line next to your husband's name for the fourth time running, and nothing will have moved. That's still worth knowing. The shepherd who counts the same limping ewe four weeks in a row at least knows which one is limping.

And some weeks you'll skip it. Fine. The sheep were still there on Wednesday.

Riches are not forever, says verse 24. Neither are the years when everyone you love sleeps under one roof and you can count them before breakfast.