I Thought I Would Be Kinder By Now

She had a picture of herself at seventy and she can still see it, which is the trouble.

She formed it at about thirty and she did not think of it as a plan. It was more like an assumption she absorbed from the women around her, or from what she thought the women around her were, which may not be the same thing.

The picture was of somebody softer. Slower to judge. Easier to be around. A woman who had had all the sharp bits worn off her by children and by hard years and by the sheer passage of time, the way a stone in a river ends up smooth.

She is seventy-one.

And on Tuesday, in a queue in a shop, somebody was slow with the card machine and something went up in her, fast, and precise, and she did not say a word of it out loud and she did not need to, because she knows exactly what was in her and so does God.

And she went out to the car and sat there and thought: I am the same.

Not identical. She is not stupid and she can see that some things have moved. But underneath, in the place the sharpness comes from, she found the exact same thing she found at thirty, and it came just as fast, and it was just as accurate, and the only real difference is that at seventy-one she has forty years of practice at not letting it out of her mouth.

Which is not the same as being kinder. She knows that. It might be better manners.

And what has been sitting on her since Tuesday is a quiet grief about forty years that she expected to do something they have not done.

And that is you in your own car, or you would not still be reading.

Fruit is not a thing that accumulates

Let me start with a word, because the word is where the picture came from and where it went wrong.

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

Fruit.

Now, a stone in a river is not fruit. A stone gets smooth by attrition. Things happen to it, it loses material, and after long enough it has a shape it did not choose and did not grow.

That is the picture you absorbed at thirty, and it is a good picture of ageing, and it is not a picture of anything in that verse.

Fruit is the opposite process. It is not what is left when the years have worn things away. It is something produced, from the inside, by a living thing, in seasons, and a tree that has been battered for forty years does not thereby produce fruit. It produces fruit because it is alive and because something is feeding it.

You are not being smoothed by time and you were never going to be. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness (Galatians 5:22), and the word chosen is fruit rather than erosion. The Holy Spirit grows it, and forty years of weather was never the mechanism.

So the grief you have been carrying since Tuesday is real and it is about a promise, and the promise was not made by God. It was made by a picture you absorbed at thirty from women you may have been reading wrongly anyway.

Now let me say the harder half, because you would not trust a page that only comforted you.

You are right that you found the same thing underneath, and nothing here is going to pretend that forty years of practice is the same as being changed. It is written that the Lord looks on the heart while man looks on the outward appearance (1 Samuel 16:7), which means your own instinct on Tuesday was accurate about the difference between silence and gentleness. The Holy Spirit is not fooled by good manners and neither, as it turns out, are you.

That instinct is worth something enormous and I want to name it before you throw it away.

A woman who can sit in a car park and tell the difference between not saying it and not meaning it is a woman with a very well developed sense of what she actually is. That is not nothing, and it is not everywhere, and it did not come from a shop queue. It came from somewhere.

You are able to see it, and the seeing is not the same faculty you had at thirty. It is written that we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, and this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). The Holy Spirit is named as the One doing it, and degrees is His word for how it comes.

And there is no rate in that verse. There is no benchmark and no schedule and nothing you can be behind on.