I Scored Myself Against The List

She does it in the first week of January and she has done it for eleven years.

It is not a resolution. She would object to the word. It is an assessment, and she designed it herself, and the design is genuinely good, which is part of what has gone wrong.

She writes out the nine down the left hand side of a page. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And then she thinks about the year properly, over about two hours, with examples, and she marks herself against each one.

Not with numbers. She is not that sort of person. She writes a sentence.

And the first year it was extremely useful. She has kept them all and the 2015 one is a good document, honest and specific, and she can see the person who wrote it.

By about year five it had become something else.

And what it is now, and she knew this in January and did it anyway, is an annual occasion for a very particular kind of despair. Because the pattern in eleven pages is unmistakable. Three of the nine are fine and always have been. Four move about. And two have never once, in eleven years, had anything to write beside them except a variation on the same admission.

Two out of nine. Every year. In her own handwriting.

And she sat with the eleven pages in front of her in January and thought something she has not been able to shake, which is: I have been failing the same exam annually and marking it myself.

And that is you with your own pages, or you would not still be reading.

One fruit, and Paul says it in the singular

Let me show you something in that verse that will change what you do in January, and it is a matter of grammar rather than sentiment.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.Galatians 5:22-23

Fruit. Singular.

Not fruits. Not the nine fruits of the Spirit, which is how it is almost always said and how you have been taught it and how you wrote it down eleven times.

Paul writes one noun and then nine words that describe it.

That is not a list of nine products to be assessed separately. It is one thing being described from nine angles, the way you might describe one person as tall, quiet, funny about queues and reliable with money. Nobody scores a friend out of four on those.

You have been marking nine boxes against a sentence that has one subject in it. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22-23), and the noun is singular and everything after it is adjectival. The Holy Spirit grows one thing, and the nine words are what it looks like from different sides.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to use a point of grammar to make your two disappear.

The two are real. You have written them down honestly eleven times and I believe every page.

You are right about the two and nothing here is going to explain them away. 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 degrees means some parts of a thing are further on than others at any given moment. The Holy Spirit is doing it by degrees, and a mixed report is what by degrees looks like on paper.

And here is the thing about your method, which is the actual problem and it is not your honesty.

You have built an instrument that can only ever return one kind of result.

Nine categories, assessed annually, by the person being assessed, with full access to her own interior. Three will look fine because three are your natural temperament. Two will look bad because two are the hard ground in you. And the design guarantees that the two will be in front of you, in your own handwriting, every January, forever.

That is not an assessment of growth. It is a very reliable machine for finding your own hard ground, which you already knew about.

You are not required to audit yourself annually, and no verse asks you to. It is written that it is the Lord who judges me, therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time (1 Corinthians 4:4-5), written by a man who says in the same breath that he does not even judge himself. The Holy Spirit did not appoint you the assessor of your own field.