Marks on the Doorframe

The frame between the kitchen and the back hall has been painted four times and the marks always come back through.

It is the last Saturday in June and the back door is open and the screen is doing that thing where it bangs twice. Somebody's radio is going two yards over. There is a bowl on the counter with the beaters still in it because the cake has gone in the oven and nobody has washed anything.

Her daughter is twelve today. So this is the part where they do the doorframe.

"Shoes off. All the way off, not the heels."

The girl stands with her back to the wood and her heels against the baseboard, and does the thing every child does, which is to lift her chin and go up on the balls of her feet, and her mother says "chin down" without even looking. The book goes flat on her head. The pencil goes underneath it. And there it is, a new line, and beside it in small letters, the initial and the date.

Then her son wants doing even though it is not his birthday, and he gets done, and then they both go out the back and the screen bangs twice.

And the frame is a whole history now. Twelve years of it. The bottom marks are so low she has to crouch to read them, and there is a set from an old apartment they moved out of in 2016 that she copied over onto a piece of card and transferred, which her husband thought was ridiculous and which she would do again.

She stands there with the pencil in her hand and the oven going behind her.

And then she does something she has done twice before and never mentioned. She turns around, puts her own back against the frame, gets her heels to the baseboard, and stands there.

And there is nothing to mark.

Not because she has stopped growing. She is forty one, she is not expecting an inch. It is that if she could make a mark for the inside of her, for the part of her that matters, she is fairly sure it would land exactly where last year's landed, and the year before that. The same temper on the same day of the week. The same thing she does when she is tired. Same woman, same height, twelve years of everybody else's lines going up the wood beside her.

Last night she said to her husband, half laughing, doing the dishes, "I would like to be a different person by Christmas." And he said something kind and she said she was joking, and she was not joking.

And I think you have stood against a doorframe. Yours might be a mirror or a photograph or the anniversary of something. But there is a wish in you with a date attached to it, and you can hear how it sounds when you say it out loud, and you said it anyway.

The wish is not the problem

I want to say first that there is nothing wrong with the sentence she said at the sink.

Wanting to be different is not vanity and it is not impatience with God. It is the most reasonable thing a person can want, and the fact that she said it while doing the dishes and then took it back tells you she has been told, somewhere along the line, that wanting it too much is a fault. It is not a fault. It is appetite, and appetite is how anybody ever gets fed.

So I am not going to take the wish off her. I am going to take the calendar off it, and those are different operations.

You are allowed to want this as much as you want it, and the wanting is not something to repent of. Psalm 42 has a man saying his soul pants after God the way a deer pants for water, and the same Spirit who carried that written line into the psalms is not embarrassed by a woman saying it over a sink at ten at night.

Now here is what a doorframe actually is, and why it fails her.

A doorframe measures a thing that only goes one way and only shows up in inches. That is what makes it a good instrument for a twelve year old and a useless one for a forty one year old. The inward change she is after does not arrive in inches, does not arrive on birthdays, and does not present itself for measurement on demand, and so the pencil in her hand has nothing to write with it.

Second Corinthians 4 says the outward man perishes while the inward man is renewed, and the renewing is done out of sight, by the Spirit.

You have been changing in a currency the wood cannot hold. What she went looking for on that frame was never going to be on that frame.

Renewed day by day

Here is the verse, and I want to be very careful with its last three words, because they are the whole thing and they are the part people turn into a program.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Day by day. Now, most of us read that as a rate. As in: a little each day, so much per week, therefore by such and such a point, so much accumulated. That is a schedule and Paul did not write one.

Read it as a supply instead. Day by day is how the manna came in the wilderness: enough for today, gathered today, and it did not keep, and the people who tried to store it up woke to a jar full of something they could not eat. Day by day is not a rate of progress. It is a way of being provided for, and it means a person is never given the year and never once needs it.

You have today's renewal in your hands and you are not carrying the rest of it. Lamentations 3 says His mercies are new every morning and that His compassions do not fail, and the Spirit brings that written line into an actual Saturday, so the portion you are holding is the whole portion you were ever asked to hold.

And look at the first three words too, because they matter to a woman with a pencil. We faint not. Paul is writing to people who cannot see any evidence, and his point is not that they should try harder to see it. It is that the renewal is going on underneath a visible situation that looks flat, and the not-fainting comes from knowing where the work is happening rather than from finally spotting it.

You are being renewed on a day when nothing looks different, and nothing about that is a contradiction. Second Corinthians 4 puts the perishing and the renewing in the same sentence at the same time, and it is His Spirit doing the inward half of it, which is why a flat-looking year and a real work can both be true in one woman.

Nobody here is handing you a date

Now, Christmas.

You may keep your own date. Hear me on that, because I do not want to take from her the one honest sentence she managed all week. If what is in you is I would like to be different by Christmas, then say it to God in those words. He is not offended by a woman with a wish and a calendar, and He has heard a great many prayers with dates in them, including from prophets.

What I will not do is hand you one. Nobody on this page is going to tell you what you will be like in six months, or that this is the season it breaks, or that the change is closer than it feels. I do not know, and anybody who tells you is guessing with your hope. God works at His own pace and He does not publish it, and every page that has ever put a clock on Him has ended up costing somebody their faith on the day the clock ran out.

You have not been put on a schedule and you were never behind on one. Ecclesiastes 3 says He has made everything beautiful in its time, and the Spirit keeps that written line from turning into either an excuse or a deadline, so there is no chart anywhere with your name and a due date on it.

And if the reason you want to be different by Christmas is that living with yourself has become genuinely hard, please put a person beside you. A doctor, because forty one and tired and flat is sometimes thyroid or iron or sleep and not the state of your soul. A counselor, who can sit with what is underneath the wish. A pastor, if there is one you trust. And if the evenings have started tipping past regret, if the thought has arrived that everybody here would manage without you and be better for it, call 988 today, or send it a text, or a line nearer your own street, and let a real person be in the house with you tonight. Help arriving through a human being is not God declining to answer. It is frequently the way He answers.