Everybody Thinks I Am Further Along

A woman asked her something on Sunday that she has not been able to shake.

They were putting chairs away and it was an ordinary conversation, and the woman said, in passing, in the way people say the most weighted things: how do you get to the point where things do not get to you any more?

And she said something warm and slightly deflecting, because she always does, and the woman went home satisfied.

And she stood there with a chair in her hands and thought: I have no idea. I am not at that point. I have never been at that point.

That was five days ago.

Here is the shape of her problem and it is not false modesty, and she would ask you to believe her about that, because false modesty is its own kind of showing off and she is genuinely not doing it.

She is treated, in that place, as somebody who has arrived. Not spoken of grandly. Just quietly assumed to be steadier, further on, past a set of things that other people are still in.

And she knows exactly what she is still in.

She could name it in a sentence. It is not scandalous. It is the sort of thing that would disappoint people rather than shock them, which she thinks is worse, and it is the same thing it was when she was twenty-nine.

So there is a gap. And the gap has been widening for years, not because she has done anything to widen it, but because people keep on assuming, and she keeps on not correcting them, because there is no way to correct it that does not turn into a performance of humility.

And what she has started calling it, privately, is dishonesty.

And that is you with a chair in your hands, or you would not still be reading.

What Paul says about his own progress, and when

Let me put a sentence in front of you and I want you to notice who is saying it and how late.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.Philippians 3:12

That is Paul. Late in his life, in prison, writing to a church that regards him as the standard, and he opens with a denial that he has arrived.

He is not being modest. Read the surrounding paragraph and you will find a man who is perfectly willing to describe his own credentials in detail when it is useful. This is not a man performing smallness.

He simply does not think he has got there, and he says so, in a letter that will be read out in a room full of people who assume he has.

You are not the first person to be regarded as further on than you are, and the most respected man in the New Testament wrote the correction into a letter. It is written, not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect (Philippians 3:12). The Holy Spirit was at work in a man who said that about himself, and the saying of it did not undo the work.

Now the gap, which is the actual thing you are carrying.

You have been calling it dishonesty. Let me look at it properly.

Dishonesty would be telling people you had arrived. You have never done that. Dishonesty would be constructing an impression. You have not constructed anything, and in fact your instinct on Sunday was to deflect rather than accept.

What you have is a gap between other people's assumption and your own knowledge, and you did not build it and you cannot dismantle it without doing exactly the performance you are trying to avoid.

You are not pretending, and being seen inaccurately is not the same as deceiving. It is written that man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), which describes the gap as a limitation in the observer rather than a fault in the observed. The Holy Spirit sees the whole of you and has never once been part of the misunderstanding.

And there is one more thing here, and it is the piece I most want to hand you.

The thing you are still in, the one you could name in a sentence, the one that has not moved since you were twenty-nine.

You are not disqualified by an unfinished thing, and Paul puts the unfinished thing and the pressing on in the same sentence. It is written, not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own (Philippians 3:12). The Holy Spirit works in people who are still in something, and the last clause of that verse is the reason it holds.

Because Christ Jesus has made me his own. That is the ground. Not progress. Not arrival. Possession, already settled, at the far end of a sentence about being unfinished.