The Same Distance From Holy

Duncan keeps a list, and it is the same list every January.

It lives on the last page of the diary, written small, and there are three things on it. He has never shown it to anybody, including his wife, and he would find it faintly humiliating to explain, because the three things are not exotic. They are the same three ordinary things a decent man might want to be less of.

Every January he writes them out again in the new diary. Every December he looks at them. And every December he arrives at the same conclusion, which he does not say out loud because it sounds dramatic and he is not a dramatic man.

Nothing has moved.

He has been a believer for twenty-six years. He was at a thing when he was twenty-two where something genuinely happened, and he does not doubt it and he never has. He goes. He gives his time. He has led a group, twice, and did it well. He prays most mornings, not brilliantly, and he reads the Bible in a way he suspects is not the way you are supposed to.

And he has been, by his own reckoning, the same distance from holy for about fifteen years.

That is the sentence. He has thought it in car parks and in the shower and standing at the back of other men's baptisms, being genuinely glad for them, and thinking it.

He is not miserable about it. That is worth saying, because people assume that too. He has simply made his peace with a shape: some men move, and some men are the ones who hold the door, and he is the second sort, and he has stopped expecting the January list to change.

Then in February he was clearing his mother's loft, and in a box under a curtain he found a diary from nine years ago, and out of pure curiosity he turned to the last page.

And the three things were not the same three things.

Two of them he did not recognize at all. He had to sit down on a joist under a bare bulb and think hard before he could even remember what the second one had been about, and when he remembered, he almost laughed, because it had been the thing. It had been the thing that would not shift. It had been the whole content of his prayers for a couple of years, and he could not now recall the last time it had crossed his mind.

He had not solved it. He had walked away from it so gradually that he had never had a single day of noticing.

And the third one, the one that was still there in both books, was written differently. In the old diary it was written the way a man writes about an enemy. In this January's, without meaning anything by it, he had written it the way a man writes about the weather.

Duncan sat in the loft for a long time.

And you know what he was working out, because you keep your own version of that list, and you have your own December sentence, and it has been the same one for years.

You have been taking the measurement from the wrong end

Here is what has actually been happening to you, and it is not what you think.

You have been measuring your distance from the finish line.

That is the only measurement you have taken, for fifteen years, every December, and the finish line does not move, and it is not supposed to, and it is a long way off. So the number comes back roughly the same every time, and the sentence writes itself: no progress.

But that is not a measurement of movement. That is a measurement of a destination, and a destination will tell you nothing at all about a journey. A man forty miles from a city and a man walking hard toward it at twelve miles a year both read as not there on that instrument.

Watch how Paul does it, because he is doing something very particular and it is easy to skim.

I do not consider that I have taken hold of it yet. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I press on toward the goal.Philippians 3:13

Take that fifteen years in. You are in motion, and distance is the ordinary condition of a person who is moving. The word says I press toward the mark, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the drawing forward at a pace He set.

He begins by conceding the whole thing. Not taken hold of it. He is not further along than you think and he says so in public, in writing, near the end of his life.

And then he does not stay there and grade himself. He turns. One thing I do. The whole weight of the sentence lands on a verb of motion, and the direction is forward, and the tense is now. He is not measuring the gap. He is describing a walk.

That is the doctrine this whole tradition was built on, and it is worth having plainly: holiness here is a direction, not an altitude. It is not a height you reach and then hold. It is a way you are facing and a road you are on, and it is entirely possible, and in fact usual, to be genuinely on it and unable to feel it.

There was a man whose heart was warmed in a meeting he had not wanted to go to, and the thing that came out of it was not a feeling that lasted. It was a timetable. Small groups. Plain rules. A great deal of time in prisons and mines. The warmth went straight into a walk, and the walk is what carried him through the decades where the warmth was not available.

Because the warmth is not the measurement either.

So take this before the story, and know it is not my consolation: you are pressing toward the mark right now, and pressing is what a person in motion looks like. His word says I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the drawing forward at a pace He set.