From Glory To Glory Is A Direction

The front room in the evening, with the light coming in low along the floor the way it does for about twenty minutes and then stops.

Five of them, and two are on the floor because the sofa seats three and nobody was going to make a fuss about chairs.

She is forty-nine.

Five years, and she has a list, and unlike most people's lists this one is precise, because she used to work with numbers and precision is what she does even when it is not helping.

Six ways she is worse than she was five years ago. She could name all six in order, with dates.

And she can name nothing at all going the other way. Not one thing. She has looked for it, honestly and repeatedly, because she is not a self-pitying woman and she would very much like to find something, and there is nothing to find.

So what she has, sitting in that room while people talk, is an asymmetry that will not resolve. Six documented movements downward and zero in any other direction, and the conclusion that follows from a data set like that is not despair. It is just arithmetic.

If you have a precise list, you know exactly how many items are on it, and you know you have never found anything to put on the other side.

Read the last clause and see whose work it is

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

What this costs is not the six things, each of which costs its own thing. It is the asymmetry. It costs you the ordinary sense that a life has more than one direction in it at a time, which most people are never asked to examine. It costs your own precision, which serves you everywhere else and here produces a total. It costs the honest search you have made, repeatedly, and come back from empty. And it costs you a conclusion that is not self-pity and cannot be argued with as if it were.

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 five 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 arithmetic has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking this room would sit more easily without you in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two on the floor, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who sit on a floor rather than make a fuss about chairs.

Now, 2 Corinthians 3, and read the whole verse including the last four words, which is where the answer to your list is.

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

Even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

That is the last clause and it names the agent. The changing described in that sentence is not something the reader performs and not something the reader is asked to produce evidence of. It is done by the Spirit, and Paul says so at the end, as the ground of the whole sentence.

Which means the direction you cannot find is not your project, and the absence of a data point is not a report on whether it is happening. You have been auditing a process that is not being run by you and is not required to file with you.

You are changed by somebody, and the sentence names Him at the end of it. Second Corinthians 3:18 puts the changing under the Spirit of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one that clause is about.

Now the verb, because it matters to a precise woman. Are changed. Present, continuous, passive. It is happening, it is ongoing, and it is being done to the person, and there is no imperative anywhere in the verse.

And the phrase from glory to glory is a direction rather than a location. It does not describe a state you are supposed to be able to verify. It describes a movement, and it is the only movement in that sentence, and it is attributed to the Spirit.

You have a direction in you that is being run by the Spirit and was never on your list to detect. That is written into 2 Corinthians 3:18, and His Spirit in you is the one named as the agent of it.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because five years of good things have already been said in that room.

It does not tell you the six items are reversing. It makes no promise about your body and does not predict item seven, and I will not, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not grade you. There is nothing in that verse you are behind on. Nobody is measuring the rate of your changing, and being unable to see it is not a mark against you, because 2 Corinthians 3:18 has no imperative in it and no standard for you to meet, and the Holy Spirit named at the end of it is not keeping a scorecard.

And the changing is not compensation. Nothing here says it is a fair exchange for the six things. It is additional. Both are true at once and neither one is a payment.

You were never the auditor of a process the Spirit is running. Scripture names the agent in the last clause, and the same Spirit who is named there is the one who carries the sentence into a front room for twenty minutes of low light.