Nobody Feels Themselves Getting Taller

The hallway is half stripped and everybody has paint on their forearms. There are dust sheets over the shoes, a radio on the stairs, and a debate about whether the second coat can wait until tomorrow, which it can and which everybody knows it can.

He gets to the wall by the kitchen door with the sanding block, and his sister says stop, quite sharply, like something is about to be broken.

Underneath two coats of off white there is a column of pencil marks.

Nobody in that hallway says anything for a bit. There they are, a dozen faint lines up the frame, each with a scribble of a name and a bit of a date, and the lowest one is so low it seems impossible that a person ever came in at that height.

His sister is thirty four and standing in the hall with a roller in her hand, and she cannot remember one single morning of it. Not one. Not being stood up against that frame, not the book on her head, not the pencil, not the being told to stand up straight. All of that happened to her and she was there for every second of it and she cannot recall any of it at all.

Which is the ordinary way of it, when you think about it. Nobody has ever stood against a door frame and felt themselves getting taller. It does not come with a sensation. Nothing arrives to tell a child that this week they gained a quarter of an inch.

And those marks are only there for one reason. Somebody with a pencil, who was in the house anyway, made a habit of writing down what nobody could feel happening.

You have been looking for your marks.

Thirty years in, or twenty, or eleven, and somebody asked you what has changed, and you went and had a proper look, and the honest answer came back thinner than you wanted. And you did not say that out loud to anybody, and you have been quietly carrying a conclusion about yourself ever since.

The audit is the wrong instrument

Before we say anything about what has or has not happened in you, look at the tool that has been in use, because the tool is the problem.

A person cannot inspect themselves for slow change. It is not a failure of honesty or attention. It is a structural impossibility. The one measuring is inside the thing being measured, with no fixed point to stand on outside their own life, and any change slow enough to be real is happening beneath the resolution of anybody's daily notice. It is asking the eye to watch the hour hand.

And there is a load in that conclusion which nobody was built to carry by themselves, so let me put the plain thing here in the middle of the hallway rather than at the bottom of the page. When God helps a person He very often does it through another person, and the help does not stop being His because it has a name and an office. Tell your doctor. Book a counselor, or sit down with your pastor, and let somebody who is not living inside your life look at it from outside. And if the thin answer has curdled into nights when you would rather not wake up, then 988 answers today, by call and by text, and so does the crisis line for your county, and one human being ought to be in this hallway with you before the light goes. None of that is a detour off the subject. In this hallway it is the subject.

You have company in this hallway, and you were never the one who had to hold the frame and mark the pencil line at the same time. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says God comforts us so that we are able to sit with somebody else in it, which makes comfort a thing built to be handed on, the way a roller gets passed along a wall rather than kept by whoever loaded it, and the Holy Spirit is doing the handing. The person who comes and stands in this hallway with you did not arrive instead of Him.

And there is a second thing wrong with the audit, which is that it is looking for the wrong sort of evidence. It goes hunting for events. Moments. A morning something broke off you. But most of what God does in a person does not arrive as an event at all. It arrives as a thing that stopped being a fight so gradually that you never got a day to notice it stopping.

You have real change in you that you were never equipped to observe, and it is not waiting on your noticing to be true. That is not me being kind about a thin list; Jesus told a parable in which the growing is explicitly hidden from the man whose field it is (Mark 4:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who does this work in a person rather than the person's own supervision of it. The farmer in that story is not scolded for missing it. Missing it is the whole point of the parable.

He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.Mark 4:27

The only parable where not knowing is the point

Stay with that story, because it is short and it is doing something no other parable does.

A man scatters seed on the ground. Then he goes to bed, and he gets up, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, and Jesus says plainly that he does not know how. Then comes the sequence: first the blade, then the head, then the full grain in the head. The earth produces of itself.

Every verb that matters in that parable belongs to the ground and the seed. The man sleeps. The man rises. The man does not know. He is not idle and he is not useless, he scattered and he will reap, but the growing is not on his list of jobs and it never was.

You are being changed by a power that does not require your attendance, and it has been running through years you would describe as nothing. The written word gives the growing to the earth and the increase to God, and His Spirit is the one who transforms a person from one degree to another while the person is busy sleeping and rising. Nobody is grading the speed. Nobody is grading the list.

And notice the sequence. Blade, then head, then full grain. A field in the blade stage is not a failed field. It is a field at the blade stage, and anybody who has stood at the edge of one in spring knows how little there is to look at.

You have been given the whole sequence and not only the part that is visible today. It is written as blade, then head, then full grain, one growth wearing three appearances rather than three verdicts, and the Spirit who brings the first is the one who brings the last. A field with nothing yet to look at is not a field that failed.