She Changed Faster Than Me

They started the same week, which is the fact the whole thing hangs on, and Ruth cannot stop returning to it.

Same week. Same course, same corridor, same conversation that went on until two in the morning in somebody's kitchen, and by the Sunday they had both, separately and without discussing it, decided the same thing.

That was fourteen months ago.

Ellie is now the person everybody assumes has been a Christian since childhood. She prays out loud in a way that does not sound like performing. She has read most of the New Testament and some of the Old and can find things. She has stopped two habits without any apparent drama and started getting up early and has that particular steadiness that Ruth notices in a room the way you notice a draft.

Ruth is not jealous of her. That is important, and it is what makes this hard to talk about, because if she were jealous it would be simple and she could repent of it and move on.

She loves Ellie. She is glad. She is genuinely, uncomplicatedly glad, and she is also, at the same time, in a place she does not have language for, because the two of them are a controlled experiment: same start date, same input, and the results have diverged so far that the only variable left is her.

That is the sentence underneath. The only variable left is me.

She has not said it to Ellie because it would hurt her and because it would sound like a request for reassurance. She has not said it to anybody else because the obvious answer, that everybody grows at their own pace, is a thing she can say to herself and has, and it does not touch the arithmetic.

If you have a friend who started when you did, hear the question. Which verse put the two of you on the same schedule?

The picture Paul reaches for is not a race

My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.Galatians 4:19

Paul had every metaphor available and he was quite happy elsewhere to use races and fights and buildings. Here, writing about spiritual growth in people he was worried about, he reaches for pregnancy.

That is a striking choice and it changes what kind of question Ruth is asking.

A race has a shared clock. Two people start together and one is measurably ahead, and the comparison is not only possible, it is the point of a race.

Formation is not like that. Until Christ be formed in you is a picture of something taking shape inside a person, over time, hidden, on a schedule set by the thing being formed rather than by an observer. Nobody has ever been able to look at two people and say which is further along in that.

You are having Christ formed in you, and it is already underway, and formation has never once been run against another person's clock. I am not saying something soothing to a student in a coffee bar. It is written in Galatians 4:19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a picture Paul chose deliberately and lays it in front of somebody running a controlled experiment on herself.

What is actually visible, and what is not

And now the specific thing, because Ruth is intelligent and she deserves the mechanism rather than the comfort.

What she can see in Ellie is a set of visible outputs: praying out loud, reading, stopping habits, getting up early, steadiness in a room. Every single one of those is a behavior with an external face.

What she cannot see is anything that is happening in Ellie underneath, or anything that is happening in herself underneath. Not one thing. She is comparing the visible surface of somebody else's life to the interior of her own, which is the oldest unfair comparison there is and the one nobody escapes by being told about it.

And there is something else she cannot see. Ellie's temperament makes external change easy and fast; she is a person who does things wholeheartedly and always has been, since long before any of this. That is a gift and it is also simply how she is built, and it means her visible outputs are running ahead of her formation, not because anything is wrong with her, but because that is what happens with people made like that.

You are looking at surfaces and living in an interior, and the two were never the same kind of evidence. Scripture says God looks not on the outward appearance but on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who is working in an interior that nobody in that coffee bar can see, including its owner.

The thing about a slow formation

And here is what I would want a twenty year old to hear, because it will matter to her at forty.

Fast is not better. It is faster. Some things that form slowly are stronger for it, and some people who arrive at steadiness in eighteen months have not yet met the thing that will test it, and the person who has spent fourteen months in a slow quiet grind with very little to show has been building on a different timescale.

Nobody can tell which is which yet. Not Ruth, not Ellie, not anybody in that building. It takes about twenty years to know, and the comparison she is running has no data in it.

You are on a schedule nobody in that room can read, and it is already His timetable and not a comparative one. It is written that He who began a good work in you will carry it on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets the pace of a formation that nobody has been given a chart for.