No Answer at the Shower

The shower is in the fellowship hall because the living room would not hold everybody, and somebody has put pale green streamers on the folding tables to make it look like less of a fellowship hall.

There is a diaper cake with a ribbon around it. There is a glass dish of those chalky pastel mints that only exist at events like this. There is a game going where everybody has a clothespin and you lose it if you say the word baby, and the pastor's wife has four clothespins on her collar and is not being humble about it.

Late in the afternoon, when the wrapping paper is in a trash bag and the plates have gone soft under the cake, the host brings out a stack of blank note cards. Write something for her to read when the baby is ten, she says. Anything. What you hope for her.

And the woman at the end of the table writes hers, and it is fine, and she is proud of it.

Then the woman beside her, who is seventy something and does not do small talk, taps the card and says: what about you. What do you want to be like when she is ten.

Not what do you want to have. Not where do you want to live. What do you want to be like.

And she opens her mouth.

What comes up first is that she wants to stop snapping at her husband in the twenty minutes before they leave the house. Then that she wants to stop checking her phone at red lights. Then something about how she would like to not be the kind of person who says yes to things and then resents them for a month.

Every single one of them is a subtraction.

She actually stops talking mid sentence, because she can hear it. Ten years is a long time and she has just described a woman defined entirely by things that are gone. Take all of it away, every habit she just named, and what is standing there? A quieter version of herself in the same kitchen, with fewer complaints against her. That is it. That is the whole picture she has been carrying, and she has been carrying it since college.

The older woman waits, and does not rescue her, and eventually says something about the cake and lets it go.

You have had that question put to you, maybe by somebody in a folding chair and maybe just by yourself at two in the morning. And if your honest answer is a list of what you would like to quit, you are not alone in that hall, and nothing is wrong with you. But something enormous is missing, and it is not willpower.

Every answer she had was a subtraction

Here is what happened in that hall, and it happens to good people constantly.

She has spent years with her eyes on her own faults, which is exhausting and also very responsible sounding, and the entire time she has never once been handed a picture of the person on the other side. So the only vocabulary available to her is the vocabulary of removal. Less of this. Fewer of those. Not so much of that.

But you cannot become an absence. Nobody has ever been transformed into a subtraction. You are being made into somebody, and being made is different from being cleaned up. Romans 8:29 says God predestined you to be conformed to the image of His Son, which is written down and is a positive statement about a Person, and the conforming is done by the Spirit of God while you sit at a folding table with nothing to say.

Notice how that verse refuses the whole framing. It does not say conformed away from your worst habits. It names a face.

The image of His Son is what the written word calls it, and the same Spirit who raised Christ is carrying out the resemblance in a person who cannot describe it yet. You have a destination with a face on it, and it was set before you had any opinions about your own habits.

Try the famous passage as a portrait

There is a chapter everybody has heard at a wedding and almost nobody has read as a description of an actual man.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Now read it again and put the name of Jesus everywhere it says charity.

Jesus suffers long. Jesus is kind. Jesus is not easily provoked. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

It fits Him exactly, without a seam anywhere, because it is not a moral code somebody assembled. It is a portrait, and Paul was describing a face he had seen.

You are being conformed to that, and it is a person and not a standard of behavior. Scripture puts love first in the list of what the Spirit produces, and produced by the Spirit is not the same as installed by a discipline, which is the whole difference between fruit and furniture.

And if you have ever felt something die inside you when a page like this starts listing virtues, that instinct is correct, and it is not rebellion. A list of traits assembled by effort makes a person you would not enjoy sitting next to. A face is a different thing entirely. You have been given the face, not the list. The written word says we behold His glory and are changed into the same image, and the Spirit is named there as the one doing it.

Love is a Person before it is a behavior

So what is she actually becoming, that woman at the end of the table?

Not a woman who does not snap at her husband. Someone who suffers long. Those two sound similar for about four seconds and then they separate completely, because one is a hole where a habit used to be and the other is a warmth that arrived from somewhere. She is not being emptied. She is being filled, and the filling has a name and a history and a face and hands with holes in them.

That is why this site will never hand you a checklist. Christlikeness is not behavior management with a nicer vocabulary, and I am not interested in getting you to a place where you sin less and love no more.

1 John says God is love and that His love is perfected in us, and Romans 5 says the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us, which is where the actual substance comes from. You are being made into love itself, which is what God is, and it is the most concrete thing in the universe.

And here is the plain paragraph I owe you, because a page about becoming can float straight past somebody who is going under. When the weight is heavier than a missing picture of the future, when the days have flattened right out or the fear will not sit down and be quiet, do not keep carrying it alone in a room. Ask a doctor, because a body sets the floor that a soul has to stand on. Ask a counselor with a real office and a standing slot on the calendar. Ask a pastor for the unedited version of the story. And if the nights have taken a turn toward wishing the whole thing would just stop, call or text 988 before this evening is over, or the crisis line where you live, and stay on with somebody who can pull the chair out and sit down in it. None of that sits in competition with what He is doing in you. It is His hand, coming in through a door that somebody else opens.