My Children Can See It And I Cannot

His daughter said it in the kitchen at Easter and the other two agreed too quickly, which is how he knew they had discussed it.

She said: you are so different from how you were.

Not as a complaint. It was warm and she was pleased and there was nothing pointed in it at all. And the other two said yes, immediately, in the way people do when a thing has already been said between them at some point when he was not there.

And he said something to move the conversation on, because that is what he does.

And he has been chewing on it since April and he still cannot find it.

That is the whole of the problem. He is not disputing that they believe it. They are not flatterers, and one of them is not a soft person at all and would not say a kind untrue thing to avoid a silence.

He simply cannot corroborate it.

He has gone back through it properly. He has thought about the man he was when they were small, and he can see that man clearly, and he does not like a good deal of what he sees. And then he has looked at himself now, honestly, and he finds the same appetites and the same reactions and the same things he does not tell anybody.

Nothing has gone. Everything he could name at thirty-five he could name at sixty-two.

So he has arrived at the only conclusion available to him from where he stands, which is that his children are describing a change in what he does rather than a change in what he is, and that they are being generous, and that he is not going to correct them because it would be unkind and because there is no way to say it that does not sound like a man fishing.

And that is you on your own porch, or you would not still be reading.

Why you were never the right witness

Let me put a verse in front of you and then say something plain about who is able to see what.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.Galatians 5:25

Keeping in step is the picture. Two walking together, one setting the pace.

And here is the thing about walking in step with somebody, which anybody who has done it will tell you: you cannot watch yourself doing it. The moment you look down at your own feet, you are out of step. The whole thing works by attention being somewhere other than on your own legs.

You were never given a view of yourself, and the not seeing is what it feels like from inside a life that is actually moving. It is written, if we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:25). The Holy Spirit sets the pace, and a person in step is looking where He is going rather than at their own feet.

Now the evidence, because you have weighed it carefully and I want to weigh it too.

You have one witness who says nothing has changed: yourself, from the inside, with full access to every appetite and reaction you have never told anybody about.

You have three witnesses who say something has, and they have known you their entire lives, and they discussed it before saying it, and one of them is not soft.

You are treating your own testimony as the one that settles it, and it is the one testimony Scripture says is partial. It is written that now we see in a mirror dimly and now I know in part (1 Corinthians 13:12), and self-knowledge is the specific thing that verse limits. The Holy Spirit sees the whole of you, and your children have seen sixty-two years of the outside, and your own inside view is the narrowest of the three.

And I want to look at the distinction you made, because it is a real one and it deserves a real answer.

You said they are describing a change in what you do, not what you are.

Here is the difficulty with that. The fruit list is not a list of internal states. Read it again: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Almost every one of those is something visible in how a person treats other people, and there is nothing in the passage that says the fruit is a feeling.

You are looking for the fruit in the place it does not grow. 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 that is a description of a person to be around rather than a description of an interior weather system. The Holy Spirit grows it where other people can see it, which is exactly where your children are looking.

The same appetites being present is not the finding you think it is. The question the list asks is what a man does with them at sixty-two, in front of the people who live with him.

Three of them have answered that question and they agree.