Nothing Has Happened For Four Years

There were two years when she could feel it happening and she has spent four years since trying not to talk about them.

She was twenty-nine and thirty. She could not tell you what started it. Something in her was moving, visibly, in ways she could name at the time and can still name now: she stopped doing a particular thing she had done since she was a teenager, she found she could sit with people in trouble without needing to fix it, she started noticing when she was about to be unkind and stopping.

It was not dramatic and there were no events. It was more like watching a room get lighter over a long morning.

And then it stopped.

Not badly. Nothing went wrong. There was no crisis and no falling away and she did not do anything.

It simply went flat, at about thirty-one, and it has been flat since.

She is thirty-five. And in four years she cannot point to one thing in herself that has changed. Not one. She has looked, because she is thorough, and the honest finding is that she came out of those two years as a particular sort of person and has been that person, unchanged in any direction, ever since.

And the thing she cannot say to anybody, because it sounds ungrateful about a period she is genuinely grateful for, is this: I think that was it.

I think whatever was going to happen in me happened, and it was a good two years, and it is over.

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

The sequence in the parable, and how long the middle is

Let me give you the sentence that comes immediately after the one everybody quotes about the seed growing while the man sleeps.

The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.Mark 4:28

Three stages, named in order, and Jesus is being deliberate about the sequence because the sequence is the teaching.

The blade. The ear. The full grain.

Now think about what those look like from a gate.

The blade is dramatic. Bare soil one week and green the next, and anybody walking past can see it and would say something about it.

The full grain is dramatic too, in a different way. It is the part that gets photographed.

And between them is the ear, which is the longest stage by a distance, and which looks, week after week after week, like a field that is not doing anything.

You are in the middle stage of a three stage sequence that Jesus names in order. It is written that the earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear (Mark 4:28). The Holy Spirit is doing the producing, and the long unremarkable stretch is a named part of it rather than an absence.

Now let me be careful, because I do not want to hand you a formula.

I am not telling you that in a certain number of months something visible will resume. Nobody knows that, and a page that promises you a next season is inventing one to make you feel better tonight.

What I am telling you is narrower and, I think, sturdier.

You are looking at a flat stretch and reading it as a stopped process, and Scripture gives you no basis for that reading. It is written that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6), and the completion date given is not four years ago. The Holy Spirit did not finish in a woman of thirty-one.

And there is one more thing, and it is about what you actually described.

You said you came out of those two years as a particular sort of person and have been that person since.

Read that again as a sentence about a field.

The things you named did not go away. You still do not do the thing you stopped doing at twenty-nine. You can still sit with people in trouble. You still notice before you are unkind.

You are holding what was grown, and holding is not the same as stopping. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience (Galatians 5:22), and fruit that stays on the tree is not fruit that has failed. The Holy Spirit grew those things in you and they are still there four years later, which is the part your inventory kept skipping.