Day Thirty-One

The first time she did it she was genuinely excited.

Thirty days. A workbook with a spine that cracked properly when you opened it, a place to write the date at the top of every page, and a promise on the back cover that she read twice in the shop before she bought it.

And she did it. Every single day. She was not one of those people who buys a thing and leaves it in the drawer, and she has receipts, in her own handwriting, in a workbook that is still on the shelf.

Day twenty-eight she wrote something is actually happening.

Day thirty-one she snapped at her sister on the phone over something so small that she cannot now remember what it was, in the exact tone she has used since she was nineteen, and put the phone down and stood in the kitchen and felt the whole thing drain out of her like a bath.

She did it again two years later. Different program. Same thing.

And what she says now, if you catch her in an honest moment, is that she has stopped buying them. Not because she has made peace with anything. Because the landing hurts more each time, and she has worked out that the drop on day thirty-one is worse than never having climbed.

She is thirty-nine. She has been a Christian since she was twenty-two.

And the sentence sitting underneath all of it, which she has never said to a living soul, is this: seventeen years, and I am fundamentally the same person, and at some point I am going to have to accept that whatever this is supposed to do, it does not do it to me.

Thirty days was never the unit He was working in

Let me take the workbooks seriously for a second, because they were not stupid and neither were you.

Wanting to change is a good want. Buying a thing and actually doing it for thirty consecutive days puts you in a small minority of humanity, and the people who wrote those books mostly meant well. This is not a piece about how you should have known better.

But hear this, and take it as already true rather than as encouragement: God began a work in you and He is not the one who set a thirty day deadline on it. That is not my soft read on seventeen years, it is what stands written to the church at Philippi, where Paul is confident of exactly one thing, and it is not the believers' consistency, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that letter is the one who has been at work in you since you were twenty-two.

Look at where Paul puts the confidence, because it is not where anybody would put it.

Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.Philippians 1:6

He who began. Not you who began. And the completion date is not next month, and it is not day thirty, and it is not this side of anything you can put in a diary.

So the timescale was never a defect in you. It was written into the arrangement before you got here, and you have been reading a schedule God never issued and then grading yourself against it. The Holy Spirit has been keeping His own time in you the whole while.

Here is what actually happened on day thirty-one, and I want you to see it properly, because you have been reading it exactly backwards.

You snapped at your sister in a tone you have used since you were nineteen. And then you noticed. You stood in the kitchen and you knew, immediately, what you had just done and what it sounded like.

At nineteen you would not have noticed. At twenty-nine you would have justified it for about four days. That is the Holy Spirit at work in a person's hearing, exactly as the word says He works in you both to will and to act.

That noticing is not nothing. It is the growth, and you looked straight past it because it did not look like the thing on the back cover. What is written is that the word of God is living and active and divides the joints from the marrow, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the dividing in you, and one of the first things He does in a person is make them able to hear their own voice.

Now let me say the careful thing, because this category is where a writer does damage.

Nobody here is handing you a standard. There is no rate you are supposed to be changing at, and there is no point at which you are supposed to have arrived, and any article that gives you a marker to measure against has just sold you the thirty day workbook in different packaging.

You are being changed into His likeness. That is a present-tense fact about you and not a target, and Scripture puts it as something being done to you rather than something you are achieving, and the Spirit of the Lord is named as the one doing it.

Slow is not the same as stalled. Those two words describe completely different situations and you have been using them as though they were one word.