A Hundred Behaviors

The wipers go once and he shuts them off, because the rain is not really rain yet, it is just October arriving on the windshield.

He is parked in the far row of the hospital staff lot at six fifty in the morning with the engine off and the thermos between his knees. Twelve years on the maintenance crew, and he knows every air handler in that building by the sound it makes when it is about to be a problem. He does this every morning before he goes in. It is the one thing he has kept.

The notebook is a spiral one, the small kind that fits in a shirt pocket, and it is the fourth of them. He turns to where the list starts and works down it, the way he has since the second one. Line after line in pencil, most of them checked, all of them still asked.

Be patient with Dana in the mornings. Stop the thing with the phone at night. Do not get short with the new kid on second shift. Be more generous. Quit interrupting. Read the Bible more than three days a week. Do not say the sarcastic thing when it is right there. Call my sister. Be less irritable when I am tired.

There are more. He counted them once at a red light, and there were a hundred and six going back nine years across four notebooks, and about thirty are the same request in different handwriting as he got older.

He prays them the way a man runs a checklist on a pump: down the column, name each one, ask for it, keep going. He means every one. He is not a man who prays things he does not mean.

And then he screws the lid back on the thermos, and he goes in, and at eleven o'clock a nurse manager says something about a work order in a tone she probably did not intend, and by eleven oh two he has said the sarcastic thing that is right there.

He is not confused about what he wants. He wants to be a different man. He has been specific about it for nine years and four notebooks and a hundred and six lines, which is more specific than most people ever get.

But here is the thing about the list, and he has never seen it, because it is the kind of thing a man cannot see from inside his own handwriting. Every single line on it is a behavior. Not one line, in nine years, asked for a mind.

A hundred requests, and every one of them an output

Let me say first that the list is not a fault. That man has prayed more honestly in a parking lot than a lot of people manage in a sanctuary, and God has heard every line of it.

But look at what the list is made of. Every entry is something that would show on the outside of him. Patience in the mornings, which Dana could observe. The phone, which a clock could measure. The sarcastic sentence, which the nurse manager could hear. He has been asking, faithfully, for outputs.

And outputs come from somewhere. Nobody produces a patient morning out of nothing. It comes out of what a man already thinks is true about himself and about the woman across the kitchen from him at six fifteen. Ask for the behavior and you are asking for fruit off a branch. Nothing wrong with fruit. But nobody has ever grown a peach by asking a branch nicely.

You have been asking Him for the fruit, and He has been standing there the whole time offering you the tree. Galatians 5:22 calls it the fruit of the Spirit rather than the fruit of effort, which puts the growing on Him, and the Spirit who is named there is the one already living in you.

And notice something else about a list made only of behaviors. It can only ever be a list of subtractions and corrections. Stop, quit, do not, be less. Nine years of it and there is no picture on that page of a man, only a picture of a man with the sharp edges filed off. That is not what God is making. Nobody in Scripture is described as the one who successfully stopped things.

Let this mind be in you

Here is the sentence that was never on the list.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.Philippians 2:5

Mind, there, is not intelligence and it is not opinions. It is the whole disposition a person moves from. What they reach for first. What they assume about their own rights before anybody says a word. And Paul, having said it, immediately shows you what that particular mind does, and this is the part that reframes everything on the notebook page.

It does not grasp. It empties itself. It takes the form of a servant. It obeys all the way down.

Read that as a description of what you are being made into, because that is what it is. Not a corrected version of the man in the truck. A man whose first motion, before he thinks, is to hand something over rather than hold it. The sentence at eleven oh two is not the problem to solve. It is the visible end of a mind that reached for its own footing when it got poked, and God is not filing the sentence off. He is changing what the man reaches for.

You have been given the mind of Christ, and nothing on that list bought it. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says it in five words and does not argue about it, and the same chapter says it is the Spirit of God who searches and delivers the deep things, so it came as a gift and it is being unfolded in you by Him.

Which is why this cannot be turned into behavior management, and I will not do it to you here. Nobody is handing you a better list. Christlikeness is not the hundred and six items successfully executed. It is a Person you are being conformed to, and Romans 8:29 uses that exact word, conformed to the image of His Son, and it is His Spirit doing the conforming.

You are being made into a likeness rather than into a record of things you stopped. That is what Romans 8:29 says the purpose is, and the Spirit is named all through that chapter as the one carrying it out, so the picture God is working from is a Person and not a page of pencil lines.

What it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

Now let me be concrete, because a mind sounds abstract until you watch one operate.

The mind of Christ at eleven oh two is not a man biting his tongue. Biting your tongue is a fine thing and it is not transformation, it is a lid held on. The mind of Christ hears the tone, notices she has been on since six with two people out sick, and genuinely wants the work order to go well for her. The sarcastic sentence does not get suppressed. It never gets made, because the man it would have come from wanted something else.

That is not a technique. There is no move to make there. It is what a different disposition produces, and dispositions are received.

And I want to put something in the middle of this plainly, because a man who has been running a list for nine years is often more tired than he lets on. If the irritability has gotten heavier than a habit, if you are short with everybody by Wednesday and sleeping badly and the list keeps growing, get a person alongside you. That belongs to what God is doing and is no substitute for it. A doctor, because a body that runs on empty will hand a man a temper that is not his character. A counselor, who will hear about the mornings with Dana without filing them as a moral failure. A friend who asks the second question. And if six fifty in that lot has quit being about the notebook and turned into weighing whether the crew and the house would do better short one man, do not drive in and swallow it. Call or text 988 today, or a crisis line, and let somebody climb into that cab and stay there with you. A man does not get to be his own maintenance crew.

Ecclesiastes 4:10 says woe to the one who is alone when he falls, because he has nobody to lift him up, and the Spirit who intercedes for a man when the man has no words of his own has never worked in isolation either, which is why this next sentence is fact and not encouragement: you are helped this morning, and you were helped through all nine years of that notebook.