The Same Four Faults Every Year

She does it in the first week of January and she has done it for nine years and she is very good at it.

It is not morbid. She would push back hard on that word. She is a woman who reviews things: she reviews the accounts, she reviews the rota, she reviews the year, and she reviews herself, and she does the last one honestly, which is more than most people manage.

She writes down what she is actually like.

And in the first week of this January she wrote four things down, and then she went and found last year's page, which she keeps, and then the one before that.

The same four.

Not similar. The same four, in slightly different words, nine years running, and she sat at that table for a long time with three sheets of paper in front of her.

She is forty seven.

The four are hers and I am not going to invent them, but you will know the kind: the thing she says about people when she is tired, the way she goes quiet instead of saying what is wrong, the way she does not stop working, and one more that she has never written in full even on her own private page.

And here is what she has done with those nine sheets, and she has never said it to a living soul.

She has concluded that nothing was planted.

Not loudly. Not in a way that has stopped her serving or praying or stacking chairs in this hall on a Thursday. Quietly, as a settled finding, the way an auditor closes a file: nine years of data, no movement on any of the four, and the honest conclusion from that data is that whatever was supposed to have happened did not.

You know the list. Yours may be three items or six. But you know what it is to look honestly at yourself over years, find the same things, and let the sameness quietly answer a much bigger question than it was ever asked.

The seed is what it is

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about being kinder to yourself you will recognize the genre and stop reading, and you would be right to.

You are not the seed's report, and you were never able to read one off a page of your own handwriting. First Peter 1:23 says incorruptible, by the word of God which lives and abides forever, and it is the Holy Spirit who did that planting.

I am not going to tell you the four are not there. You have nine years of careful evidence and you are a truthful woman and I am not going to insult that.

The pit is a category error, and it is a precise one, which is why it has survived nine reviews by somebody as exact as you.

You have been reading the state of the plant as a report on the seed.

Here is the verse.

Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.1 Peter 1:23

Read where Peter puts the weight.

He does not say born again into an improved temperament. He does not say born again and here is the rate of change you should expect by year nine. He puts the whole of it on the seed, and then he says the one thing about the seed that matters, which is what kind of seed it is.

Incorruptible. Not fast. Not visible. Incorruptible, and by the word of God, which lives and abides forever.

A seed is judged by what it is. A plant in January is judged by January.

Take that at the table with the three sheets in front of you, and know it is not me softening a hard finding, it is what is written. The seed you were born of is incorruptible, and nine sheets of paper are not a report on it. First Peter puts the whole of the mechanism on the word of God, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and He did not make the fact of it contingent on your rate of improvement.

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 Peter and 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 reading the seed when you read your own handwriting, and you were never able to. First Peter 1:23 says incorruptible, by the word of God which lives and abides forever, and it is the Holy Spirit who planted it, and nine sheets of paper are not the instrument for that question.

I will not pronounce on where you stand, because that is not mine to do from a page. I am telling you what the verse makes the evidence, and it is not the list.