I Know What Should Have Happened By Now

He noticed it in the margin of somebody else's book, which is the only reason he noticed it at all.

He was reading something on formation, a good book by a careful writer, and he found himself making a note that said: by this stage, though, you would expect.

And he stopped, with the pen in his hand, because he did not know where the expectation had come from.

He has read a great deal in this area. Thirty-odd years of it, in three traditions, and he has taught some of it, and he would have said that he holds it lightly and does not import schemes into the text.

And what he found, when he went looking, is that he has an entire timetable in him.

It is not written down anywhere. He has never taught it. But it is there and it is detailed, and it says things like: the sharp temper goes in the first decade, the fear of what people think goes somewhere around the second, and by thirty years in a man should be substantially settled, and if a thing is still exactly where it was at twenty-five then something has gone wrong that is worth examining.

He is fifty-eight. He has been measuring himself against that schedule for years and losing.

And so, being who he is, he did the obvious thing. He spent four days going through the New Testament looking for the timetable.

He is not going to pretend the finding was dramatic. It was simply this: there is not one. There is nothing that says by this point, or after so long, or a mature believer should by now. He looked properly. He went through every formation passage he knows and several he had to find.

There is no schedule anywhere in it.

And that left him with a stranger question than the one he started with, which is: where did mine come from, and why have I been sentencing myself with it?

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

What is in the text instead of a timetable

You have done the work, so let me not repeat it. Let me put beside it the thing the text does say about timing, because there is something, and it is not what a schedule is.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.Isaiah 55:8-9

Now, that is usually deployed as a comfort for people in trouble, and it works there. It is doing something more specific for a man who has just spent four days looking for a schedule.

It is a statement about the incommensurability of two sets of methods. Not that God is slower than you expected. That His way of proceeding is not on the same scale as yours, in a manner the text compares to the distance between the sky and the ground.

You went looking for a timetable and found a sentence that says the timing is not on your scale. It is written, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord (Isaiah 55:8). The Holy Spirit works to something that is not a slower version of your schedule but a different order of thing entirely.

And the passage before it, which you will know, is about rain and snow coming down and not returning empty, and about a word going out and accomplishing what it was sent for.

That is the picture Isaiah puts next to the sentence about ways. Weather and germination. Nothing that runs to a stated date, and nothing you could put in a margin.

You are inside a process Scripture describes as weather rather than as a schedule. It is written that the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth (Isaiah 55:10), which is a picture with no date anywhere in it. The Holy Spirit works at that order and always has.

Now let me say something about where your timetable came from, and I offer it as a guess because it is one.

You have read thirty years of accounts, in three traditions, written mostly by people who had reached somewhere and were describing how they got there. And a person reading two hundred such accounts will, without deciding to, average them, and the average will feel like a norm, and the norm will become a schedule.

You built a schedule from a reading list and then judged your own life by it. It is written that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another, and this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18), and no interval is given for a degree anywhere in Scripture. The Holy Spirit sets the rate, and He has never published it.