Three Things That Are Different Now

Somebody asked him at a barbecue, meaning nothing by it: so how are you doing with all that?

And he heard himself say, same as ever, and then went and stood by the cool box for a bit longer than he needed to.

Because it is the same as ever. That is the whole trouble. Four years on the same request, four years of the same words, and if you put him under oath and asked him to name one thing God had done about it, he would have to say that he could not point to anything at all.

He is not bitter. That is what makes it hard to talk about. Bitter would be simpler. What he actually is, is flat, in a way that has taken years to arrive at, and that nobody has noticed because he still turns up and still helps stack the chairs.

What he does not know, standing by the cool box with a paper plate, is that his sister said something to her husband on the drive over that he did not hear.

She said: he is so much softer than he used to be.

That is where this one starts. Not with the thing he has been asking about. With him.

We have been looking in one place

Here is what I think has happened, and I say it gently because four years is a long time to be at anything.

You have been watching one square of ground, and Scripture never said it was the only one. The circumstance. The thing itself. Every morning for four years that square has been checked to see whether anything moved in it, and nothing has, and so the answer has been no, four years running, and a person can only file that answer so many times before something in them goes flat. The word says God is at work in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that, in a location nobody thinks to check.

But God has not been confined to that square, and He has not been idle, and the fact that you cannot see anything there does not mean there is nothing anywhere.

God has been working on you the whole time you have been watching the other thing. That is not a consolation I am offering: it is what is written, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6), and the work named there is in a person and not in their circumstances, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been doing it, quietly, through four years in which you noticed nothing.

Notice what that verse does not say. It does not say He will finish the thing you are asking about by a certain date. It says the work in you is underway and it is His to complete, and that is not a smaller promise, it is a different and better one.

Why you cannot see it

There is a reason this kind of change is invisible to the person it happens to, and it is not spiritual dullness on your part.

It cannot be seen from the inside, because the instrument doing the measuring is the thing being measured. Nobody notices their own softening. The man at the cool box has become gentler in a specific way with specific people over a specific four years, and every single one of those changes happened at a speed slower than his ability to detect, and the only people who can see it are the ones who drive over and say something about it in the car.

So the flatness is not evidence. It is the ordinary blindness of being inside the thing.

You are not the same person who started asking, and you did not do that to yourself. The written word says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works (Ephesians 2:10), and workmanship is a word about somebody else's hands, and the Spirit is what makes that sit down in a man who thinks nothing has happened.

The one thing I am not going to do

I am not going to tell you what your three things are.

I could guess. I could write a warm paragraph about somebody probably being more patient now, and it would be the exact wrong move, because a list built by somebody else is a list that gets read and put down, and there have been plenty of those.

And I am certainly not going to tell you that the flatness is a gift, or that the four years were sent to teach you, or that the delay was for your character. I do not believe that and I am not going to say it to you. What I am saying is narrower and it is true: while you were watching the one square, He was at work in you, and that is worth going and looking at.

One more thing before you go and look, because this site is about going without and somebody reading this is planning to. Nothing you go without makes God's work in you go faster, and some people must not go without food at all. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are unwell, underweight or frail, or if you are unsure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. And if flat has turned into something heavier lately, please ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. Flat that has gone on a long time is worth telling a doctor about, and that is not a spiritual failure, it is sense. The written word says He knoweth our frame (Psalm 103:14), and the Holy Spirit does the work in a person at His own speed and not at the speed of what they give up.