The Countdown on the Mirror

The number this morning is 214.

It is written in dry erase marker in the top right corner of the bathroom mirror, small, in her own handwriting, where it does not get in the way of anybody's face. Under it, on a piece of masking tape stuck to the glass, is the date. June the twelfth. Twenty years since the wedding, and they are going back to the same place, the one with the porch and the bad coffee, and there is a photograph of the two of them on that porch that she keeps on her phone and looks at more than she would admit.

She wants to be a different woman standing on that porch.

That is the whole reason for the number. She started it in November on a Sunday night that was harder than most, and every morning since then she has come in here, run her thumb across the last one, and written the new one, and it has become the first honest sentence of her day.

This morning the fan is rattling the way it does, and one of the two bulbs over the mirror went out weeks ago so the light is lopsided. Her toothbrush is in a cup with three others. There is a verse card curling at the corner, stuck to the frame with a piece of the same masking tape, and she cannot remember when she put it there.

She wipes 215 off with her thumb. She writes 214.

And she stands there for a second longer than usual with the marker in her hand, because she can hear it. She can hear exactly how it sounds, this business of counting down to the morning she becomes somebody. Two hundred and fourteen days to fix a woman. She said it to her sister once and made it a joke, and her sister laughed and then did not laugh.

What she has actually done, without ever deciding to, is turn 214 days of her one life into a hallway. A corridor of Tuesdays that only count as approach. The porch matters. June the twelfth matters. This morning, in a bathroom with a rattling fan, is just the distance to be crossed.

You have a number somewhere. It might be on a mirror and it might just be in your chest. A birthday with a zero in it. A wedding. The day the last one leaves for college. The date you have quietly decided is when you would like to finally be a different person, and you can hear how it sounds too, which is why you are reading this instead of brushing your teeth.

Nobody here is going to take the date away from you

Let me say first what I am not doing, because pages like this often start by confiscating something.

I am not going to tell you the porch does not matter, or that wanting to be different is a spiritual problem, or that a woman who longs for change has misunderstood grace. The longing is not the trouble. The longing is the most alive thing in that bathroom. God put a want in you for a self that is more like Him and less exhausting to live inside, and He is not annoyed by it.

The trouble is what the number does to the days in between. You are living inside a day God actually made, not walking through a corridor toward one. Psalm 118 says this is the day the Lord has made, present tense, about the one you are standing in, and His Spirit is what makes a written line like that land in a room with a rattling fan at six in the morning.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not say some days are the Lord's and the rest are transit. It hands the whole thing over, this one, the ordinary Wednesday one, the one with 214 on the glass.

That is the written word's own claim about the twenty four hours in front of you, and the Spirit of God is what turns a made day into a lived one in a woman who has not had her coffee yet. You have today, and it was made rather than merely survived.

Where the psalm puts the rejoicing

Read it in full, because the second half is where it gets uncomfortable in a good way.

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.Psalm 118:24

In it. Not in the anticipation of a better one. Not on the porch in June. In this one, the lopsided light one, the one where nothing has changed since yesterday except a digit.

I love this verse and I also want to be honest that it is harder than the coffee mugs make it look. Rejoicing in a day you were only planning to endure takes something. But look at what it rests on, because it does not rest on the day being nice. It rests on the day being made. Somebody made it on purpose, and He knew what was going to be in it, and He put you in it rather than in June.

You were placed in this exact Wednesday by a God who does nothing at random. Acts 17 says He determined the times set for us and the exact places where we would live, which is written down and is not a comfort somebody invented, and His Spirit is present in the room He put you in.

What one degree actually is

Here is the thing that changes everything about the number on the mirror, and it took me years to see it.

There is a verse everyone quotes about being transformed from one degree of glory to another. We tend to hear it as a progress bar. Small increments, adding up, and the point of each one is the total at the end.

But a degree is not a fraction of the real thing. It is the real thing, at today's size. A day's worth of light is not an incomplete version of light. It is light, and it is enough for one day, which is exactly how God has always done food and mercy and everything else He hands out by the morning.

So today's degree is not a payment toward June. It is whole. You are being changed today, in this degree, and it is complete in itself rather than a down payment on a better version. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says from one degree to another and hands the whole operation to the Lord who is the Spirit, so nothing about today's measure depends on you making it add up to something by a date.

And here is the plain paragraph, right in the middle where you cannot miss it. If the countdown on your mirror has teeth in it, if what is really underneath the number is a sense that you are running out of time to be worth something, please get a person into this with you. A counselor with an office and a next appointment. A doctor, because sleep and hormones and a body under strain change what a morning feels like more than anybody admits. A pastor who hears the version nobody else has ever heard. And if there have been mornings when the thought of never reaching June came as a relief rather than a dread, call 988 today, or a crisis line that answers where you live, and get one human being close enough to sit down beside you. Asking for that is not giving up on the change you are after. It is one of the ways God brings it.