I Am Worse Than I Was At Eighteen

It started with a video her mother sent her, which is nobody's fault.

It was from a thing at church nine years ago. She is eighteen in it. She is talking to two people at the side of a room about something and she is not aware of the camera, and it is about forty seconds long.

And what she saw, watching it on a Tuesday night on her phone in bed, was somebody warmer than she is.

That is the whole thing and it has not let go of her since March.

The girl in the video is open. She is interested in the person in front of her in a way that is completely unguarded. She says something at about twenty-eight seconds that is slightly naive and entirely sincere and would make a cynical person wince, and she is not embarrassed by it, and she says it looking straight at somebody.

She is twenty-seven now and she does not talk to people like that.

She would say she is more competent. She would say she is better at almost everything measurable. She is easier to work with, she is not late, she does not say naive things.

And she is not warm in that way any more and she cannot get back to it and she does not know when it went.

So the verdict she has been carrying since March is not the ordinary one. It is not: I have not grown. It is worse and colder than that.

It is: I have gone backwards, and the fruit that was in me at eighteen has quietly gone, and nobody noticed, including me, for about nine years.

And that is you with your phone on your chest, or you would not still be reading.

The verse about seeing, and what it says about your instrument

Let me put down the one you know, because everybody knows it, and then use it for something nobody uses it for.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.1 Corinthians 13:12

That is normally read as a verse about the future. It is also, and more usefully for you tonight, a verse about the present.

Now I know in part.

Not: now I know a bit less than I would like. Paul says the knowing itself is partial, structurally, as a permanent feature of being a person before the end.

And the knowing he means includes self-knowledge. He says a few lines earlier that he would rather be known than know, and the whole passage runs on the assumption that the clearest thing about us is not available to us.

You are not equipped to run the comparison you have been running since March. It is written, now I know in part, and now we see in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Holy Spirit knows what has happened in you over nine years, and He has not issued that information to you.

Now the video, because I want to look at what it actually is.

It is forty seconds. It is one side of one conversation, at one moment, on one day, when you were eighteen and had no idea a camera was running.

And you have set it against nine years of living with yourself from the inside, in which you have full access to every unkind thought you have had, every time you did not say the warm thing, every moment of self-consciousness in a conversation.

You are comparing a stranger's outside with your own inside, and no person has ever won that comparison. It is written that man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and in this case you are doing both at once to two different people. The Holy Spirit sees both the girl and the woman and does not run the comparison you are running.

And now the thing about warmth, because I am not going to dismiss it. You saw something real. I believe you.

Here is a possibility, offered as a possibility, because I do not know your nine years.

Warmth at eighteen is very often free. It costs almost nothing, because eighteen has not yet been let down in the particular way that makes a person careful, and it has not yet had to be warm on a day when it did not feel like it.

Warmth at twenty-seven, if it is there at all, has usually been paid for.

You are not looking at fruit that has gone, and something that costs you is not a lesser version of something that was free. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness (Galatians 5:22), and there is no clause in it about the fruit being easy. The Holy Spirit is growing something in a twenty-seven year old that an eighteen year old did not have to grow.