Longer Than My Patience

The coat had been in the back of the wardrobe since March, and the receipt in the pocket was for a coffee she could not remember buying, and folded behind it was the list.

Three lines. Her handwriting, in biro, on the back of an envelope.

She read them standing up, still holding the coat, and the feeling that arrived was not disappointment exactly. It was more like meeting yourself coming the other way.

Because they were this year's three lines. Word for word, more or less. The same temper. The same thing she does at eleven at night with her phone. The same person she has not forgiven, whose name she had written as an initial, as if the envelope might be read out in court.

She had made that list in January, full of a specific kind of quiet resolve, and she had meant every word of it, and she had been meaning every word of it for what she now counted on her fingers to be nine years.

Nine Januaries. Three lines. Roughly the same distance from the finish as when she started.

And the thought underneath, the one she does not say to anyone, is not I must try harder. It is older and flatter than that.

Maybe this does not work on me.

She put the list back in the pocket, which is its own kind of confession, and hung the coat up again.

There is something wrong with the sentence she has been carrying, and it is not the part she thinks.

Look at the verb

Here is the line, and the whole thing turns on its grammar.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the splendour of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.2 Corinthians 3:18

Are being transformed.

Not transform yourself. Not have transformed. Not will have finished transforming by a date you have written on the back of an envelope. It is a passive verb in a continuous tense, which is a technical way of saying two things at once: it is being done to you, and it is not finished.

Both halves matter, and you have been carrying neither. Both of them are written into the one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding them together while you carry neither.

The first half is that you are not the mechanic. Nine years of Januaries assumed you were the one doing the work, which is why nine years of Januaries have felt like nine failed attempts. They were not nine attempts. They were nine years of something slow happening in a person who could not see it because she was standing inside it.

The second half is that continuous means continuing. It has not stopped. A thing that is being done is, by definition, still going on, and there is no verse anywhere that puts a completion date on this side of it. What is written is continuous, and the Holy Spirit has not stopped for a single January.

And then look at what the sentence says you are actually doing while it happens: beholding. Looking. Not straining, not gripping, not achieving. Looking at Him, the way you look at something you love, which is the least effortful activity a human being does and the one that changes a face the most.

There is a whole tradition that has held this quietly for a very long time. It does not argue people into changing. It puts the same words in their mouths for years, and lets beauty do slowly what argument does never, and it is entirely unembarrassed about how long that takes. Envoys sent to find a faith once came back saying they did not know whether they had been in heaven or on earth. They had not been persuaded. They had been looked at something.

And nothing here is a criticism of anyone who changes fast. Some people are met on a road and are not the same by the evening, and that is real, and it is His to give. This is for the ones for whom it has been slow, and who have started to read slow as a verdict.

It is not a verdict. It is a tense.