Seven Years of Scaffolding

The scaffolding went up on the church roof in the March she moved to the village and it is still there.

Seven years. There have been three phases and two funding gaps and a period of fourteen months where absolutely nothing happened because of something with the timbers that nobody in the village fully understood.

She has never once thought badly of it.

Genuinely. She has been to the fundraising things. She has an opinion about the tea urn. When a man in the shop said something sour about it in the second year she found herself defending a building she does not attend, and she was slightly surprised at herself.

She has said, out loud, more than once: you cannot rush that kind of work.

And she has been in her own repair for two years and two months.

It started properly in the June after the year she does not talk about. She goes every three weeks. She has done the reading, and stopped doing the reading, and started again.

And in the second year she began keeping a private tally, which she would not describe as a tally, of how much better she is than she was.

And most weeks the answer is: not enough, given how long it has been.

She has never once put those two things side by side. A roof gets seven years and fourteen months of nothing and a woman defending it in a shop. She gets two years and two months and a running assessment.

What is inherited comes through faith and patience together

Let me name the double standard without turning it into another fault to add to the list.

You are not a hypocrite. Everybody does this. Nobody has ever met a person who is as generous with themselves as they are with a building or a friend, and the reason is not vanity, it is that you can see the inside of your own repair and cannot see the inside of anybody else's.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as sympathy: what you are waiting for arrives through two things together, and one of them is time. That is not my kind reading of two years and two months, it is what stands written in Hebrews, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line has been at work in you since the June it started.

Read the pairing, because the writer does not separate them.

We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.Hebrews 6:12

Faith and patience. Both, joined, as the way anybody inherits anything.

He does not say faith gets you there and patience is what you do while you wait. He puts them side by side as a single method, and he attaches them to inheritance, which is by definition a thing that arrives on somebody else's timing.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better tally: you are inside the method rather than failing it, because the written word makes patience half of how a promise is inherited and the Spirit of God is the one supplying both halves.

Now let me put the roof beside you properly, since you have never done it.

Three phases. Two funding gaps. Fourteen months where nothing happened because of something with the timbers.

You know what you say about that. You say you cannot rush that kind of work, and you mean it, and you defended it in a shop against a sour man in your second year here.

Now say what you would say about a woman who is two years and two months into repairing something that took a great deal longer than that to break.

You would not say not enough, given how long it has been. You would not think it. If a friend said that sentence to you across a table you would put your cup down.

And here is what the tally is actually doing, which is worth seeing plainly: it is scaffolding on a building nobody is allowed to work on. Every week you assess is a week you spend inspecting rather than being repaired, and it does not speed anything up and it never has.

What is written joins faith and patience as one method, and the Holy Spirit is doing something in you that has fourteen months of timber work in it that nobody in the village would understand.

And the guard, because it belongs: this is not telling you to stop noticing whether you are getting better. Notice. Tell the person you see every three weeks. Just stop grading, because a grade is not a noticing, it is a verdict, and nobody in Scripture is ever asked to pass one on themselves.