Three People Until Me

There are eleven of them in the living room and none of the chairs match.

Four kitchen chairs carried in. A sofa with a blanket over the arm where the cat has been at it. Two folding chairs from the garage that still smell like the garage. A candle on the coffee table that smells like a bakery and not like anything that has ever actually been baked. A plate of store cookies nobody has touched since the first ten minutes.

The question came from the host, who meant it kindly. It is going around clockwise. What has God grown in you this year.

Clockwise means she has time. She counts. Three people until her.

The man on the sofa is going long, the way he always goes long, and normally that would irritate her and tonight she is grateful for every extra sentence. Two people until her. The woman in the green chair says something about patience with a coworker, and says it plainly, and it is true, and the room nods.

One person until her.

She is doing math instead of listening. Twenty two years. Baptized in a lake at church camp at nineteen, in water that smelled like pennies and had a dock with a nail sticking up out of it. Twenty two years of Sundays. Three churches. A Tuesday morning study for four of those years. Two children raised, mostly. A marriage held.

And she cannot name a thing.

She tries patience, and hears it leave her mouth in advance, and it sounds like the thing a person says. She tries trusting God more with my son, which is a sentence, and which is not true this year. She thinks the word growth at herself and cannot get it to stick to anything she has actually lived through since January.

The mug in her hand has a chip in the rim on the side she does not drink from.

She could pass. People pass. Passing is allowed, and everyone is kind about it, and everyone remembers.

The woman beside her finishes.

Ten faces turn, warmly, in the light of a candle that smells like a bakery.

And you know that circle, because the question comes around in other rooms too. A form at a membership class. A parent asking how your faith is these days. Your own head at two in the morning, which asks it in a much less friendly voice and never once passes the cookies.

First the blade, and nobody photographs the blade

Jesus told a story about a man who scatters seed and then goes to bed.

That is the whole of the man's part. He sleeps and gets up, night and day, and the seed comes up, and the line Jesus puts in next is the line that should be written on the inside of every small group living room in America: he knows not how.

You are inside a growing that does not file reports with you, and the not knowing how is written into the parable itself. Mark 4:27 says the man sleeps and rises and the seed springs and grows and he knows not how, and it is the Spirit of God who does the growing in a person, not the person's ability to give an account of it afterward.

For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.Mark 4:28

Three stages, in a fixed order, and only one of them looks like anything from the road. Nobody photographs a blade. Nobody drives past a field of blade and says look at that. A blade is two inches of green that a person could step on without noticing, and it is the stage Jesus named first, on purpose, out loud.

You have a blade already up, and a blade is not a smaller kind of failure. That is what is written in Mark 4:28, first the blade, then the ear, and the Spirit who gave that order has never once run the stages backward for anybody, so the invisible stage is not the stage where nothing is happening. It is the stage where nothing is photogenic.

The worst placed person in the room to see it is you

Here is the plain trouble with the question going around that circle. Nobody alive is worse placed to see a change in a person than the person it happened to.

You live at zero distance. Every day of it happened in order with no gap, which is exactly the condition under which a slow change becomes invisible. Nobody notices their own hair growing. They notice a photograph from three years ago.

So ask somebody else. Not for reassurance, and not tonight in the circle. Ask one person who has known you a long time what is different, and then hold still while they answer, because they will not say what you would say. They will say something about how you handle a certain phone call now. Or a sentence you used to finish and now let go. Or a season when they braced whenever your name came up, and how long it has been since they braced.

You are not the auditor of this work and you were never appointed to the post. His word hands the growing to God, who gives the increase while one plants and another waters, 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the increasing, which makes an honest I do not know in a living room a true answer rather than a poor one.

And nothing here is going to tell you what twenty two years ought to have produced. A short answer is not a bad sign, a blank answer is not a bad sign, and the length of what a person can say out loud on a Tuesday has never been the measure of what God has been doing in them.

You have changed in ways that circle would name faster than you ever could. It is written that man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Spirit has been working at the depth the room cannot see, which happens to be the same depth you cannot see either.

When you cannot see anything good, including this

There is a version of I cannot name one thing that is not modesty and is not humility.

It is flatness. If nothing has looked good for months, and that includes your children, food, music, weather, and every hour of the day at about the same gray level, then what is in the room is not a spiritual shortage. That is a medical fact, and it deserves a medical answer alongside everything else.

So see a doctor. Sleep, thyroid, iron, pain, grief and depression all strip a person of the ability to see anything good, and they strip it out of her own life first, which is exactly why a woman in that folding chair cannot find a word to say. See a counselor too, and hear this plainly: when help comes through a human being it is God who sent it, and taking it is never settling for less than Him. And if the two in the morning voice has moved past regret into building a case for your absence, 988 will pick up tonight, by phone or by text, and so will the crisis line for the county you live in, and one person ought to be close enough to come and sit down on that sofa.

You are not being graded tonight, and you were not being graded across any of the twenty two years. His word says there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, Romans 8:1, and the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus is the one who settled that, so a question in a living room is a question and it was never a verdict.