Slow Is Not Stalled

Alan was painting the door frame when he found them.

He had scraped it back and he was going along the edge with the brush, half listening to something on the radio, and the pencil marks came up out of the old gloss like writing under water.

Little horizontal lines. A name beside each one, in his own handwriting, and a date. Fourteen of them, going up.

He stopped painting.

And what got him was not the marks. It was that he could not remember making a single one of them. Not one. He remembered the ritual in general, the standing straight against the frame, the book flat on the head, the arguments about shoes. But no particular occasion. It had been done fourteen times over eleven years and he could not put his hand on one afternoon of it.

Here is the thing that made him sit down on the dust sheet.

He had never once seen them grow.

Not once. He was there every single day of it. He was there for every meal, every school run, every bath, every haircut, every argument about pudding, for eleven years, and at no point in that entire time did he look at either of his children and see a change happen.

The change happened at a speed he was not built to observe. And the only reason he knows it happened at all is that somebody, occasionally, made a mark on a door frame.

Alan has been a Christian for twenty-two years, and he has never made a mark.

He would tell you, if you asked him honestly late in the evening, that he is not noticeably different from the man who started. He would say he still loses his temper. He still wastes the evenings. He still does the thing he has asked God about approximately four thousand times.

He has read the books that say you should be changed and he believes them, and he cannot find the evidence, and after twenty-two years that has quietly become one of the sorest places in him.

And you know exactly where this sits, because you have your own version of that sentence and you have said it to almost nobody.

I have been at this a long time and I cannot see that it has done anything.

You are not saying it to be dramatic. You are saying it because you have looked, carefully, more than once, and you have not been able to find what you were told would be there.

You are not failing a fast process, you are inside a slow one

I want to change one thing in what you believe about this, and it is not the thing you expect. That is not my opinion about you: it is what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work at His own rate.

I am not going to tell you to look harder. I am not going to tell you that you are more changed than you think and just need a better attitude about it. That is a nice sentence and it is not enough to stand on.

I want to change the timescale.

Because the thing you have been assessing yourself against is a fast process, and there is no fast process. There never was. You were handed, somewhere along the way, the idea that following Jesus produces visible change on a schedule a person can perceive, and then you have spent two decades failing to perceive it, and you concluded the fault was in you.

Look at how Paul actually describes it, and look at the tense, because the tense is the whole thing. What is written is the ground of all of this, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a tense into a life.

And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory.2 Corinthians 3:18

Are being transformed. Not were transformed on a Tuesday in your twenties. Not will be transformed if you finally get serious. Are being. Present, continuous, unfinished, and going on right now, including on the days you have no sense of it whatsoever.

And notice what you are doing while it happens. Beholding. You are looking at Him. That is the posture named in the verse, and it is not a technique and it is not effort. You are not the sculptor here. You are the one facing the light, and the change is happening to you rather than being achieved by you. The written word puts the beholding on your side and the transforming on His, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the transforming.

Now let me be exact about what you are becoming, because this is where the wheels come off if the words go loose.

You are being made like Him. You are not becoming Him. The verse says into the same image, and an image is a likeness, and a likeness is a created thing that resembles. God remains God, entirely and always, and you remain a human being that He loves and is remaking. Nobody in this message is becoming divine, and the astonishing part was never that. The astonishing part is that a person can be made to resemble Christ at all, and that the work is being done by Him, in you, at the speed things actually change.

Which is slowly. That pace is written into the sentence itself, and the Holy Spirit has never apologized for it.

Which is the speed of a child growing in a house where a man who loves them cannot see it happening.