I Thought I Did It By Deciding

He made a decision at twenty two and he has been holding it up ever since.

He can tell you where he was and what he said, and it was real and he meant it, and there is nothing wrong with any of it. He decided. He turned. He meant it more than he has meant nearly anything.

He is forty four.

And the shape his faith has taken since is this: he believes, without ever having said it out loud, that his decision is what brought him into this, and that therefore his decision is what keeps him in it, and that if the decision ever failed the whole thing would go.

So he holds it up.

That is a real activity and it takes real effort and it has taken twenty two years of it. He re-decides, quietly, often. He checks the decision when he is tired. He renews it at the start of every year, and at the end of any hard week, and he has done it in the car after a funeral and in a hospital corridor and once in the middle of a work meeting where nothing at all was happening.

And he is worn out.

Not from the faith. He would say the faith has been good to him, and it has, and there are people who would not be standing if he had not been what he has been for twenty two years.

He is worn out from the holding.

He said it to himself on a beach in August, watching his brother's children run into the water, and he said it in a way that surprised him.

He thought: my arm has been up for twenty two years.

You know the holding. Yours may not have started with a decision at twenty two. But you know what it is to believe that something you did is what keeps a thing in place, and to have been quietly maintaining it ever since without ever asking whether it needed maintaining.

The will of man is ruled out by name

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an argument about whether decisions matter you will get interested and miss the thing.

Your decision at twenty two mattered. It was real, it was yours, and God is not indifferent to it, and nothing here is going to describe it as unimportant.

The pit is a confusion about what it did. You have been treating it as the cause, and treating yourself as the thing sustaining the cause, and so you have been carrying the entire weight of an arrangement that was never resting on you, and your arm has been up for twenty two years.

Here is the verse.

Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13

Read the third exclusion, because it is yours.

Not of the will of man.

That phrase is in there by name. John did not leave the mechanism vague and hope nobody asked. He listed the things that do not produce this: not descent, not any human urge or effort, and not anybody's will, which includes yours.

But of God.

Take that on the beach, and know it is not my correction, it is what is written. The thing you have been holding up was never resting on your will, and it says so in the verse by name. John 1:13 rules out the will of man explicitly, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the birthing, and He did not do it on condition that a man keep re-deciding it every January.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.

You are not the thing holding this open, and you were never load bearing here. John 1:13 excludes the will of man explicitly and leaves the whole of it with God, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the birthing, and He did not make it conditional on a January.

I am not going to pronounce on where you stand, because no page should. What I will say is what the verse says about the mechanism, and the mechanism is not your arm.