Conformed Is Not The Same As Repaired

Lanterns strung between the two walls and a long table under them and the whole family out, which happens about four times a year and is worth the argument it takes to arrange.

Somebody's uncle is telling a story that has grown considerably since last year.

He is fifty-three.

Six years, and this is the thing he has never put into words for anybody, and it took him about a year to notice he was even carrying it.

He thinks of himself as a machine in for repair.

That is the whole picture and it governs everything. There was a working version, and it broke, and God is presumably now doing something about it, and the outcome, when it comes, will be a restored unit. Better than it was, maybe, but the same category of thing: a fixed version of a broken one.

Which means, and here is where it does its damage, that everything happening to him is the workshop. The six years are the shop floor. He is out of service. He is in a process whose entire meaning is the return to function, and if the return does not come, then the six years were a workshop with nothing at the end of it.

If you have been thinking of yourself as a repair job, you know how completely it organizes your life, and you know nobody handed you that picture on purpose.

Conformed is a word about a person

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the six years. It is the meaning they have been given. It costs you the possibility that anything is happening except the delay before a repair. It costs you the ordinary experience of a Tuesday, which under that picture is not a day of your life but a day of downtime. It costs the family table, a little, because a man who thinks he is out of service is a man attending his own life provisionally. And it costs you a whole future, because under that picture there are only two outcomes and one of them is that it was all for nothing.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your six years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the second outcome has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking this table would run without a chair for you at it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the uncle with the story, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who argue for a month to get everybody in one place.

Now, Romans 8, and read the word and then read who it is about.

For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.Romans 8:29

Conformed to the image of his Son.

Now hold that against your picture. Repair is a word with a backward reference in it. It means returning a thing to a prior specification, and the prior specification is the whole point, and the highest possible outcome of a repair is that you cannot tell it happened.

Conform is a word with a forward reference and it points at somebody else. It means being brought into the same shape as a pattern that is not your own former self. And the pattern named in that verse is a person: the Son.

So the process you are in is not aimed at the man you were in the year before it started. It is aimed at somebody who is not you and never was, and who is alive.

You are being shaped toward a person rather than restored to a specification. Romans 8:29 names the image of His Son as the pattern, and the Holy Spirit is the one described eight verses earlier as the firstfruits in you.

Now, the last clause, which is the one that decides what kind of process it is. That he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

The purpose named is a family. Not a functioning unit returned to service. A household with an eldest brother in it and a great many others, and the point of the conforming is the relationship between them.

You have been brought into a family rather than a workshop. That is written into Romans 8:29, and His Spirit in you is the one who cries Father in a person, which is the language of the same household.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because six years of good sentences have already been said under those lanterns.

It does not tell you anything about your body. It is not a promise of function and it is not a denial of it, and I will not predict either, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not make the six years a preparation you are being graded on. Nothing in that verse turns your suffering into a curriculum or the outcome into a reward for bearing it well. God is the subject of every verb in the sentence: He foreknew, He predestined. You are not being marked, and there is no standard in that verse that you are behind on.

You were never in a workshop being assessed on how the repair is going. Scripture names a person as the pattern and a family as the purpose, and the same Spirit who is the firstfruits is the one who carries that to a long table under strung lanterns.