If you asked her to confess, she would not have to think about it, and that is the whole trouble.
There are three. She could say them in eleven seconds. She has said them, in various rooms, to various people, in various words, since she was twenty three years old.
Not enormous things. That is worth saying, because people assume a list like this is dramatic. It is not. It is: the way she talks about one particular person when that person is not in the room. The thing she does with her phone at night that she has decided is a small dishonesty. And the third one, which she has only ever said out loud twice, both times to the same friend, and which is really a habit of the heart rather than a thing she does.
She is forty four.
Twenty one years, and the list has not changed.
Every so often something happens that makes her want to be different. A weekend away. A good stretch of reading. A sermon that gets in. And for about eleven days everything is different and then, without any drama at all, it is not.
Here is the conclusion, and she has never once said it out loud, and it has been operating quietly under her whole spiritual life for about a decade.
Maybe this is just who I am.
Not said in despair. Said in the way a person accepts a mild chronic condition. She still prays. She still goes. She has simply stopped expecting the list to change, and somewhere in that acceptance a small light went out and nobody noticed, including her.
He knows what you are made of
There is a verse in the middle of a psalm about mercy that says something so plain it gets read past.
For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14
Hear that at the kitchen table. You are known all the way down and the list was never news. The word says He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a kindness and not a shrug.
He knows our frame.
Frame is a building word. It means what a thing is constructed from and where the joints are and what it can bear. And the psalm puts that immediately after a line about a father pitying his children, which is the tone the sentence is written in: not clinical assessment, but a parent who knows exactly how a child is made.
He is not being told about your three. He knew them before you did. He knew them at twenty three, when you first said them out loud in a room with the heating on too high, and He was not startled then and He has not become startled since.
So take this at your kitchen table, and know it is not my softening, it is what is written: you are known all the way down, right now, and the list has never once been news to Him. His word says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a kindness rather than a shrug, because a shrug would leave you where you are and He has never once done that.
Now hold the other end, because this is where the article could go wrong and let you off something you do not actually want to be let off.
He knows your frame. He does not agree that this is just who you are.
There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught something about holiness that got him mocked in his own century and misunderstood in every one since. He said a believer goes on. Not arrives, goes on.
And what he meant by it was almost aggressively practical. He did not mean a believer becomes flawless on a Tuesday. He meant that the direction of a life is a real thing, that God actually changes people, slowly, in the ordinary week, and that a person is meant to expect motion rather than settle for a plateau.
He had people in his small groups ask each other, out loud, every week, how it stood with them. Not to catch anybody out. Because a person who says it out loud every seven days cannot quietly conclude, over a decade, that nothing is moving.
The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about 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 what the two of them together produced was movement, which is the thing your conclusion has ruled out.
Your list is a doorframe, not a diagnosis.
And the list has no line on it for the person holding the list. His word says He knoweth our frame, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been changing that person for twenty one years at a pace the three cannot register.
It has stayed the same. That is true, and I am not going to pretend it away, and neither is God, who is far less impressed by comfortable evasions than most preachers.
But look at what the list cannot see.
Twenty one years ago, when you first said those three, did you say them in eleven seconds without flinching? You did not. Did you have any idea, at twenty three, that the third one was a habit of the heart rather than a thing you did? You did not; it took you nine years to be able to name it at all.
The list has not changed. The person holding the list has changed enormously, and there is no line on the list for that, which is why you have been reading a flat measurement as a flat life.
You are being changed right now, and I am not saying it to reassure you; it is written that we are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the changing, at His pace, in a woman who has kept turning up for twenty one years.
And that sentence, maybe this is just who I am. Take it and put it down. It is not humility. Humility is agreeing with God about yourself and God has not said that about you anywhere. He knows your frame, He is not disappointed, and He is not finished, and those three facts sit together without any tension at all.
He knows your frame. He has never once been startled by your list.
You are known all the way down and the list has never once been news to Him. His word says He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a kindness rather than a shrug, because a shrug would leave you where you are and He has never done that.
Declare this over yourself
- List of three, you are a doorframe and you are not a diagnosis, and you do not get to tell me what I am. His word says He knows my frame and remembers I am dust, so I hand you over in the name of Jesus.
- Conclusion I never said out loud, that maybe this is just who I am, you have no ground in this kitchen. Scripture says we are changed from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord, and it is His Spirit doing it, at His pace, and He is not finished.
- God, You know my frame and You have never once been startled by my list. Your word says You remember that we are dust, so I say the three out loud tonight and I say what You know about me straight after them.
Psalm 103:14
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