Everyone In The House Is Further Along

There are four adults in that house and he is certain he is the fourth.

His wife prays. Not in a performing way, in a way he happens to know about because he has come down at five in the morning for water twice and found her, and both times he went back upstairs without saying anything and lay in bed feeling something complicated.

His daughter, who is twenty two, reads the way people read when they are hungry. She underlines. She asks him questions he cannot answer and then goes and finds out.

And his brother in law, who has lived with them for two years and who is the gentlest man he has ever met, and who is gentle at eleven at night when the news is bad, which is when a man's gentleness is actually being measured.

Then there is him.

He has been a believer for twenty six years. He goes. He gives. He prays before meals and he means it. He would tell you, and it is true, that he loves God.

And he has settled, over about a decade, into a quiet position at the bottom of his own household's league table, and he has never once said this to a single person, and it colors nearly everything about his interior life.

The word for it is not envy. He is proud of all three of them and would defend any of them to anybody.

It is more like a man who has stopped entering a race he is still running in.

We all, with open face

Paul writes one sentence about how a person is changed and there are two words in it that dismantle a league table.

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

Take that in your own hallway. You are one of the all, and that is the grammar and not a consolation. The word says we all, with open face, are changed into the same image, and it is the Holy Spirit who sets four speeds under one roof.

We all.

Not the advanced. Not the gifted. Not the ones who get up at five. We all, and then the mechanism, which is beholding, and then the agent, which is the Spirit of the Lord, and there is no clause anywhere in that verse about relative position.

And look at the direction it describes: from glory to glory. Not from failure toward glory, with everybody strung out along the road at different distances. From glory, to glory. Every person in that sentence is already in the first one.

So take this in your own house, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: you are being changed right now, tonight, by the same Spirit and in the same direction as everybody else under that roof. His word says we all, with open face, are changed from glory to glory, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the changing, which means the pace was never yours to set and never yours to compare.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on. It got him mocked and it still gets misunderstood.

He did not mean a race with placings in it. He meant motion, in the ordinary week, at whatever speed a life allows, and he was fiercely practical about it: small groups meeting at a set hour, plain questions asked out loud, a short reading, an ordinary practice small enough to survive a bad month.

And here is the part for you. In those rooms the question was never how are you doing compared to the others. It was how does it stand with you. Six people, each asked the same question, each answering about their own week, and no comparison anywhere in the mechanism.

He built it that way on purpose, because he had seen what happens to a person who measures their inside against another person's outside, which is the exact thing you have been doing at five in the morning on the stairs.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and neither of them had a ranking in it.