Four Months And You Never Counted It

The last time was the fourth of April and he can tell you what it was about, which was nothing.

A shoe. The location of a shoe, at eight fifteen in the morning, with everybody late. He said four sentences at a volume that was not necessary and his daughter went very still and got in the car and did not speak to him for the whole journey.

He sat in the car park at work for eleven minutes afterward.

That was April. It is August.

Four months, near enough. And in those four months there have been at least a dozen occasions of the same kind, some of them considerably worse than a shoe, including a Saturday in June that anybody would have shouted about.

He did not shout. He did not go cold either, which is his other one. He was, in every one of those, something like patient.

He has not noticed any of this.

If you asked him how he is doing with his temper he would say, honestly, that it is a work in progress and that he has a long way to go, and he would mean it, and he would not be able to tell you when the last time was without working it out.

That is the whole subject of this article. Not the temper. The not noticing.

Because there is a fifteen year old girl in that house who has noticed, and she has not said anything, and she has quietly begun to relax around her father in a way neither of them could describe.

Fruit is grown, not achieved

Paul makes a list and the framing of it does most of the work, and almost everybody reads the list and misses the frame.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.Galatians 5:22-23

Take that where you are. You have something real growing in you and it is countable. The word calls longsuffering and temperance the fruit of the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who grew it in a house with a fifteen year old watching.

Fruit.

Not the achievements of the Spirit. Not the disciplines of the Spirit. Fruit, which is a thing that grows, slowly, at its own pace, mostly at night, on a tree that is not consulted about the timing and cannot make it happen faster by wanting it.

And look at two of the words on that list, because they are yours. Longsuffering, which is the old word for a long fuse. Temperance, which is self control.

Those are named as fruit. Which means when they appear in a man they are evidence of something growing rather than proof that he tried hard, and it also means they can be counted, because fruit is a countable thing and a tree that has nine apples on it has nine apples whatever the man standing under it feels about his year.

So take this where you are, and know it is not my flattery, it is what is written: something has grown in you and it is real, right now, in August. His word names longsuffering and temperance as the fruit of the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who grew it, in four months you have not once looked at.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on, and got mocked for it, and is still misunderstood.

He never said a man arrives. He said a man moves. And the practical instrument he built for it was a room of six people, once a week, asked out loud how it stood with them.

Not to catch anybody out. To make the invisible visible. A man who says out loud every week what has been going on cannot arrive in August unable to remember April, and cannot spend four months being genuinely different and conclude that he has a long way to go and nothing else.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and one of the things the method did was count the fruit.