Three People Ahead of Her

There is a bowl of pretzels on the coffee table that nobody has touched since the first ten minutes, and she has been looking at it for a while now.

Six of them in the living room. Two on the couch, three on kitchen chairs somebody carried in, and her in the armchair by the lamp with her mug gone cold in both hands. Outside it is that stretch of evening where the light goes gold and then goes fast.

The leader asked it at ten past eight, in the nicest possible way. Before we finish, let us go around: what has God changed in you this year?

The woman on the far end of the couch went first and took four minutes, and it was true and good and everybody said so. The man beside her talked about his temper and got quiet at the end. The college kid said something about a habit and a Bible app and made everybody laugh.

Three people ahead of her.

She is running the year, month by month, the way you scroll back through a camera roll looking for one specific photo. January. The move. Her sister. That week in April. And there is nothing in it she could lift out and say in this room and have it sound like an answer.

There are things. She has not snapped at her sister on the phone since maybe the spring, though she is not certain, and anyway that is not really anything. She is less afraid of Sunday mornings, though she could not tell you when that shifted. There was a thing she used to do in October and she did not do it this year, and she only noticed just now, sitting here, with the pretzels.

None of that is an answer. That is a shrug with details on it.

Two people ahead.

What she wants is one clean sentence with a shape to it, a before and an after, the kind the woman on the couch had. What she has is a year with no headline in it, and a growing certainty that if nothing can be named then probably nothing happened.

You know the circle. Yours might be a small group, or a year end, or a conversation with somebody who asks good questions. And you know the scroll back through the months, and the moment you realize there is nothing in it that would sound like an answer.

The one man in camp who could not see it

The verse everybody quotes about being changed says something odd about who is doing the looking, and almost nobody notices it.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.2 Corinthians 3:18

Read where the eyes are. Not on the face being changed. On the glory of the Lord. The glass is a mirror, and what is in the mirror is Him. And the verb is passive: are changed. It is being done to a person, by the Spirit of the Lord, while that person is looking at somebody else entirely.

You are being changed while your attention is somewhere other than yourself, and you were never given the job of watching it happen. That is not my opinion of the verse, it is the grammar of 2 Corinthians 3:18 with the Spirit named right there in the last clause, doing the changing, which means the work has never once depended on the accuracy of anybody's inventory.

Paul got that image from a specific man on a specific mountain, and the detail he is drawing on is the one that undoes an evening like tonight.

And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.Exodus 34:29

Moses did not know. The whole camp could see it. Aaron could see it. He had to be told, and then he had to put a veil on because it was frightening people, and none of that changed the fact that he came down the mountain unable to see the one thing nobody else could stop looking at.

You have the same blind spot he had, and it is already yours as a feature of how this works rather than a fault in you. His word puts the not-knowing right into the account of the shining, and it is the Spirit who does what the mirror verse describes, so a person being unable to itemize it is exactly what Scripture led you to expect.

From glory to glory is not a schedule

I want to slow down on four words in that verse, because they carry more weight than people give them: from glory to glory.

Not from nothing to glory. Not from zero to a headline. From one to the next, which means every stage of it is already glory, and the movement between them is a gradient rather than a jump. Nobody watching a gradient from the inside can tell you where they are on it.

I work with sound, and there is a thing every singer learns and nobody quite believes at first. Nobody hears their own voice the way a room hears it. What reaches your ears comes partly through the bone of your own skull, which is why the first time you hear yourself on a recording you think somebody has done something to it. The singer in the booth is the least reliable witness to her own tone in the building.

You are the worst placed person in that living room to hear what has changed in you, and you were never appointed the judge of it. Scripture hands that verdict to God and gives the labor to His Spirit, which is why the room can hear a difference in a friend that the friend flatly cannot hear in herself.

And notice what the verse does not do. It gives no rate. It does not say how many glories a year, or what a person ought to show by December. Paul describes a direction, not a quota, and the pace belongs to the Spirit of the Lord, who has never once been in a hurry to satisfy a circle of chairs.

You have a pace that is His and not the room's, and it is already settled that the timetable was never handed to you. It is written that the changing is by the Spirit of the Lord, and He is the one setting the tempo, which is why nobody in that living room, including you, is qualified to say you are behind.

The things that do not make a noise

Now let me go back to your list, the one you called a shrug with details on it, because I want to say something about the shape of it.

Every item on it is an absence: no snapping at a sister, no dread on Sunday morning, a thing from last October that simply did not happen this year. And absences make no sound. There is no moment, no scene, no before and after, because the whole content of it is a thing that failed to happen and therefore has no story attached.

That is not a small list badly told. That is what a real change looks like from the inside for most of a year. Fruit does not announce itself. Nobody has ever heard an apple appear.

You are holding a real thing when you hold an absence, and you were reading it as nothing only because it never made a noise. Scripture is full of the quiet kind: a tree planted by water whose leaf does not wither, which is a description of what does not happen to it, and it is the Spirit who grows that sort of thing slowly and without announcement.

I am not going to grade the list, and I want to say that plainly, because it has been graded in that chair for twenty minutes already and found thin. A short list is not a bad sign. A list nobody can see is not a bad sign. The man with the shining face had no list either.

And the leader asked a good question. It is not a trap and the people answering are not performing. It is a room trying to give God credit out loud, which is a lovely thing for a room to do, and none of that turns it into an examination.

You are welcome in that circle with an answer that is one sentence long, and you were welcome there before the question was asked. His word never sets a minimum length on giving God credit, and it is the same Spirit at work in the four minute answer and the four word one.