Four Coats on the Same Patch

The tin says eggshell and the wall says otherwise.

He is three rungs up a stepladder on the second floor landing with a roller in his hand, and the patch he came to cover has grown again. It was the size of a spread hand the first time. It is the size of a serving tray now, because every coat has to feather out past the last one, and feathering out is how a small repair quietly becomes a wall.

People keep going past him while he works. A woman with two grocery bags tells him he is doing a lovely job and turns sideways to squeeze by. A teenager from the top floor takes the stairs two at a time with his headphones in. Somebody on the third is frying onions, and the whole stairwell smells of it underneath the paint.

He has been up this ladder before. Twice last year. Once the year before that. Every time he told himself this was the coat that would finally match, and every time the afternoon light came round the corner of the window and showed him the seam, running across the wall like a tide mark exactly where he had stopped.

And you know the wall he means, because you have one, and yours is not in a stairwell. It is the thing you have been going over since you were about nineteen. The temper that arrives in the room before you do. The three days of silence. The thing you do with your phone at midnight, or with food, or with money. You have painted it and painted it. Every coat feathered out a little wider. Every afternoon, the light came round.

Nobody was ever changed by staring at the patch

Here is the thing nobody says out loud on a landing. Looking hard at what is wrong with you has never once made you into somebody else. It has made you tired, and it has made you an expert. There is no living person who knows your patch the way you know it. You could give a lecture on it. You could name the month it started and the room it started in.

And the tiredness is honest tiredness. Twenty years of coats is a real twenty years, and nobody is standing at the bottom of that ladder with a clipboard. Not God, and certainly not me.

But there is a sentence in Scripture that puts the eyes somewhere else entirely, and everything on this shelf rests on it.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.2 Corinthians 3:18

Read where the eyes are in that sentence. Not on the patch. Not on the progress. On Him. You are being changed today, while you look at Jesus, and the changing is not your labor. I am not laying my own encouragement over you like one more coat: that is what the written word says is happening to every single person who looks, and the same verse names the Holy Spirit as the one doing the transforming. Not you. Not me. Him.

And notice the tense, because the verse is not making an appointment. It says are being. Present, continuous, already under way, in a person who cannot feel a thing.

A face turned to the light does not have to concentrate

Let me say what this looking is not, because this is where it usually goes wrong.

It is not a discipline anybody can perform incorrectly. There is no posture to get right, no minimum number of minutes, no breathing to master, no state to reach before it counts. The moment looking at Christ becomes another item on the list, the list has swallowed the cure, and the ladder comes back out with a smaller roller.

Nobody has ever browned their arms by concentrating. A person sits out where the light is falling, the light does the rest, and somebody says at supper that the sun has caught them. They did not do the catching. They did the sitting.

You have already been given the one thing that makes this work, and it is not your attention span. The word says that when a person turns to the Lord the veil is taken away, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. So the looking is not effort buying something. It is a face turned into light that was already pouring down the stairwell before anybody opened a tin.

That is the mercy in the mechanism. A man who is exhausted can still look. A woman who has failed every promise she made herself in January can still look. Looking is the one thing the weakest person in the building can do, which is very likely why God chose it.

The change is happening where you cannot watch it

Here is the hard comedy of standing this close to your own wall: nobody alive is worse placed to notice it changing.

So ask the people who have known you fifteen years. They will not describe the patch you would describe. They will say something about waiters. Or about a sentence you let go now instead of finishing. Or about a season when they used to brace whenever your name came up on the phone, and how long it has been since they braced.

You were changed in the last two years in ways you could not list if I asked you, and the fact that you cannot list them is not evidence against them. Scripture says the good work begun in you belongs to the One who began it, and He is the one carrying it on; the Holy Spirit does not wait on your paperwork before He starts. Growth underground is still growth. Nothing planted has ever filed a report.

This is also the place where writing like this usually starts grading people, so let me refuse it out loud and in advance. There is no schedule here. Nothing on this shelf will tell you where you ought to be by now, or hold up somebody's overnight transformation as the shape yours is supposed to take. God keeps no schedule you could read off a wall, and He has never once walked another man's landing and then come back to yours for a comparison.

When the patch is hurting somebody

If the thing you keep painting over is doing damage, to you or to the people in your house, then hear this next part as plainly as I know how to say it.

Bringing somebody up those stairs with you is not a step away from the work God has going on this landing. It is an instrument in His hand, and it always has been. See a doctor, because sleep and pain and whatever a body has run short of will discolor a man's whole reading of himself. Book a counselor and keep going back, week after week, with the account nobody in this stairwell ever gets. Tell a pastor the unpainted version. And if the evenings have lately gone somewhere past regret, if staying here has quit feeling obvious, call or text 988 before this night is out, and ask one friend to come and sit down on the step until the worst of it passes.

You are not up this ladder on your own, and there was not one of those twenty years when you were. The written word calls Him the God who is near to the brokenhearted, and the name Jesus handed His Spirit was Helper, which is a post He took up and not a kind word said about you. Nobody in this house was ever asked to do the hard part on their own.