Two Oclock on a Friday

The last bus pulled out at 2:47 and the building has gone that particular kind of quiet that only a school gets.

She is sitting in one of the small chairs with her knees up around her elbows, which is ridiculous, and she knows it, and she is not moving. Twenty six third graders were in this room forty minutes ago. Now the chairs are up on the desks the way the custodian likes them, except for hers. There is glitter permanently in the seam of the carpet from October. The spider plant on the filing cabinet is mostly brown. Somebody's sneaker is under the reading rug and she will find out whose on Monday.

At two oclock she lost it.

Not shouting, exactly. Worse than shouting, because it was quiet. She brought a book down flat on the desk, hard, and she said a boy's name in a voice she does not use, a voice from somewhere she does not visit, and the room went absolutely silent. And she watched a girl in the second row open her eyes wide.

That is the part sitting in her chest right now. The wide eyes.

She apologized four minutes later, out loud, to all of them, and they forgave her instantly and completely, the way eight year olds do, and were fine within the hour, and that made it worse and not better.

On Monday morning she sat in her car in the lot before seven with her hands on the wheel and prayed one sentence: Lord, make me patient this week. She wrote it on a sticky note and put it on the side of her monitor so she would see it forty times a day. It is still there. It has a coffee ring on the corner.

So she is on a plastic chair built for a person four feet tall, in a room that smells like dry erase marker and pencil shavings, doing the thing she does every Friday at this hour, which is trying to answer a question she has never been able to answer: if somebody asked what is actually different about me now, what would I say. She has been in this faith her whole adult life. She prays. She means it. And the honest list is short, and today it got shorter by one item, at two oclock, in front of twenty six children.

You know the two oclock. Yours might be a kitchen, or a phone call, or a message you sent and cannot unsend, and the same short list, and the same Monday prayer with a coffee ring on it. And you know the quiet afterward, when the room empties and there is nobody left to be patient with and the only person in it is the one you are disappointed in.

Fruit is not output

Let me sit down here on the rug with you, because I am not going to do this standing over you.

I want to read you a list you have read a hundred times, and I want you to hear one word in it that most people skate past.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.Galatians 5:22-23

Fruit. Not output. Not results. Not the achievements of the diligent believer. Paul did not call it the work of the Christian, and he had the vocabulary to, because a few verses earlier he lists the works of the flesh. Works, over there. Fruit, over here. And then he says whose fruit it is, and it is not yours. It is the Spirit's.

You are looking at a harvest with your name on the ledger and God's name on the field. Galatians 5:22 says fruit of the Spirit, and the Spirit is the one who grows what grows, which means the short list you keep is a list of somebody else's crop and you have been auditing it as though it were your production quota.

Now think about what a peach actually is. Nobody has ever shouted one into existence. Nobody has motivated a tree. There is no Friday afternoon on which a peach tree has failed, and there is no orchard anywhere that produces in its first season what it produces in its tenth. And a tree in a bad week is not a different species of tree.

You were never the grower here, and no verse in this passage ever put you in that job. It is written of the Spirit, in that order, and it is His Spirit who does the growing while a woman is busy teaching long division, which is exactly why the growing does not stop on the days she is not managing it.

What the wide eyes actually mean

Now let me be careful with you, because this is the place where somebody usually starts handing out marks and I am not going to.

I will not grade your list. I am not going to look at a bad Friday and tell you what it proves about you, in either direction, because that is not mine to say and it is not yours either. What I will do is show you the shape Scripture gives to this life, because the shape is not what you have been assuming.

Read a few lines up from the fruit. Paul says the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other (Galatians 5:17). That is a description of a conflict. Not a smooth climb. Not a line on a chart going up. A war, described in a letter, to believers, as the ordinary condition of the road. Which means a hard afternoon is inside the description of this life and not outside of it, and the day you had is written about in the book, and it is written about without contempt.

You have not fallen off the page of your own Bible today. Galatians 5:17 puts the struggle right there in the text, and the Spirit named in that same sentence is the one contending in it, on your side, in a classroom with glitter in the carpet.

And I will say one more thing about the wide eyes. You noticed them. You noticed, and it went into your chest and stayed, and four minutes later you said sorry out loud to twenty six eight year olds. I am not telling you what that adds up to. I am telling you it happened, and that you have not counted it, because the list you keep only accepts entries in one column.

Changed from glory to glory, which is a direction

Here is the sentence about change that I want in your hands going into the weekend.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.2 Corinthians 3:18

Look at how it works. Beholding, not straining. Changed, in the passive, which means somebody else is doing the changing. From glory to glory, which is a direction and not a deadline. And then Paul names the one doing it, in case anybody wondered: even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

You are being changed rather than changing yourself, and the verb is in somebody else's hands. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says are changed, and it is the Spirit of the Lord who does it, so the pace of it is His, and I will not stand here and hand you a schedule, because Scripture does not give one and I will not invent what God did not say.

What He did say, through Paul to the Philippians, is that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6). Begun and performed. Both verbs His. Nothing in that sentence is waiting on a Friday to go well.