A Run of Good Months

Her daughter is eleven and has a way of going still when a voice changes, and the going still is worse than anything a child could say.

That is the thing she cannot get past. Not the shouting itself, which she could probably survive as a category of failure, but the stillness afterward, the way an eleven year old learns to disappear inside her own face while somebody who loves her finishes.

Three years ago, after one of them, she sat on the edge of that child's bed at eleven at night when the girl was asleep and told God, out loud, in a whisper, that she would be different. Not try. Be. She was as serious as she has ever been about anything.

She has been different in patches.

That is the honest report and she would give it herself. There have been genuinely good months. There was a stretch last spring of about fourteen weeks that she is proud of and does not talk about. And there have been evenings since that she would not describe to me and I would not ask her to.

So here is what she has decided, and this is a woman who runs a department and thinks in quarters, so it has the shape of a review:

She does not count as back until she has a run to show for it. Six months, she thinks, though the number moves. Six months of the way she wants to be, and then she will stop feeling like a fraud in a room full of people praising God, and then she will put her hand up for something, and then she will be able to pray about her daughter without the whole thing feeling like a claim she cannot substantiate.

Until then she attends. She does not participate. She is, in her own words to nobody, in a probation period she set herself and is administering with real diligence.

You may be running a review like that. And you may be very good at it, and it may be the only thing in your life you never let slide, and it may be entirely your own invention.

Paul asks it as a question

Now let me do what I do, which is put a text in front of you and make you look at the grammar, because the grammar is the argument.

Paul is writing to people who started well and then went back to a system, and he is not calm about it. And in the middle of it he asks a question that he does not answer, because the question answers itself if you say it slowly.

Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?Galatians 3:3

You were begun by the Spirit and you are being completed by the same Spirit, and neither end of it is yours. Galatians 3:3 leaves the question open precisely so it will answer itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the perfecting through every patch you have been grading.

Begun in the Spirit

Read the two halves and notice they are describing two different power supplies.

Begun in the Spirit. That is how it started. Not by effort, not by a run of good months, not by a track record. It began somewhere else entirely and by somebody else entirely, and every one of those Galatians knew it, which is why the question stings.

Made perfect by the flesh. Perfect there means completed, brought to its end. And flesh is not a word about the body; it is Paul's word for human resource, human effort, the self as the engine.

So the question is: you were started by one power and you are trying to be finished by another. And he calls that foolish, which is a strong word, and he uses it because it is not a moral failure so much as a category error, like plugging a thing into the wrong supply and wondering why it will not run.

You are trying to complete by your own effort a thing that was started by His Spirit. Galatians 3:3 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a furious letter and lays it on a woman sitting on the edge of a child's bed.

And I want to be exact about your review, because you are precise and you will respect exactness.

Your six months is not repentance. Repentance is turning, and turning happens in a moment and can happen four hundred times. Your six months is evidence. It is a portfolio you intend to submit. And the submission has a purpose: it would let you come back with a claim rather than empty handed, and coming back with a claim is very much more comfortable than coming back with nothing.

You have been building a case for a hearing that is not scheduled. Scripture puts the beginning and the completing in the same Spirit, and the Spirit of God has been at that work through the patchy years you have been grading.

Nothing goes back on

And now the guard, because this is where people get hurt.

I am not taking six months off you and giving you six weeks. I am not saying you do not need a run but you do need to have really turned a corner, or to be able to say honestly that you are trying. Every one of those is the same review with a shorter reporting period, and by Thursday you would be measuring yourself against it, because that is what you do.

The condition comes off. Nothing goes on.

You are inside on His terms this morning, and His terms were completed by Him and are not up for review. The word puts it plainly, and that is the plain force of having begun in the Spirit, and His Spirit is the one who has been doing the perfecting for three years while you kept the file.

And your daughter? She matters more than anything in this article and I am not going to hand you a technique. But whatever changes in that house will come out of a woman who is being carried, and not out of a woman with a portfolio. If there is help available to you, ordinary help, take it. That is not a condition. That is sense.