Trying To Be Worthy Of A Second One

Kalani was twenty-six and it lasted a night and he has spent twenty years since building a man it might come back to.

He would not describe it that way. If you asked him what the last twenty years have been about he would say something ordinary and true about growing, and about wanting to be useful, and about his family.

But there is a shape under it that he saw about eight months ago and has not been able to stop seeing.

Every discipline he has taken up, he took up after a period when nothing had come. The early mornings. The years of a particular kind of reading. Two separate stretches of eating less. A rule he keeps about his phone that nobody knows about. All of them arrived in the trough after a stretch of quiet, and all of them were, though he never once put it in words, an application.

Twenty years of quietly submitting himself as a candidate.

And it has produced a good life. That is what makes it hard to look at. He is a better man than he was at twenty-six by any measure his family would use, and the disciplines are not fake and some of them he now loves.

But underneath them there has been an arrangement he never agreed to and never examined, which is that the night at twenty-six was a response to something, and that if he could work out what, and be more of it, there would be another.

Nothing has come in twenty years.

He is forty-six.

You may know the shape.

Maybe you also took something up in a trough. Maybe more than once. And maybe you have never asked yourself what you were applying for.

The question Paul asks twice

There is a question in Galatians that Paul asks in a tone of real exasperation, and it is aimed at exactly this arrangement.

Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?Galatians 3:3

Having begun in the Spirit.

He grants the beginning. That is not in dispute anywhere in the letter: something real happened, given, not achieved, and he does not question it for a moment.

Are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

And then he names what they have started doing since, which is trying to advance on a different mechanism from the one they began on. Not wickedness. Effort. Discipline. Serious, sincere religious labor, applied to a thing that had arrived by gift.

Which is a description of your twenty years written before you were born.

And notice what Paul does not do. He does not tell them the disciplines are sinful, and he does not tell them to stop. He asks them a question about mechanism, because the problem is not the labor, it is what the labor has been asked to accomplish.

And what began by gift was never going to be advanced by effort. The written word grants the beginning and questions only the mechanism that came after it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been applying for twenty years without knowing it.

And you cannot summon it and were never meant to be able to. The word puts the beginning in the Spirit rather than in the flesh, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than assessing an application.

What the twenty years actually did

Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this message that would waste two decades of a man's life and I am not going to write it.

The disciplines were not a mistake.

They have made you better in ways your family would name, and you love some of them now, and a man who gets up early and reads seriously and keeps a rule about his phone has not been wasting his time even if his reasons were tangled. Almost nobody's reasons are untangled.

What can be dropped is only the application, which is a small thing sitting under a large one.

Keep the mornings. Keep the reading. Drop the submission, and notice, over about six months, which of the disciplines you actually want without it.

Some of them will fall away. That will tell you something and it will not be a bad thing to learn.

And the labor was not wasted and only its purpose was misfiled. The word never once calls the effort sinful and asks only what it has been asked to achieve, and the Spirit is the one who separates a good practice from a bad reason without discarding both.

And nothing about you is under review for twenty years of applying. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who saw the shape eight months ago and has been quietly ashamed of it since.

What the first one actually was

One more thing, and it is the piece that dissolves the arrangement rather than merely exposing it.

You have assumed the night at twenty-six was a response.

That is the load-bearing assumption. If it was a response, then there was something in the twenty-six year old that produced it, and the whole twenty year project follows logically.

But you were twenty-six. Think about what you were then. By your own account you are a considerably better man now, which means the version of you that received it was the less developed one, which means it cannot have been given on the basis of anything you had accumulated, because you had accumulated less.

The arrangement collapses on its own arithmetic. It just needed to be said out loud once.

And it was not given on the basis of what you had. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, lest any man should boast, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover the whole business rather than only the beginning of it.