Renewing Is Something Done To Me

Back porch, warm evening, five people on the steps with plates on their knees because there were never going to be enough chairs and nobody minds.

Somebody's dog has worked out who is softest and is working that person exclusively.

She is thirty-seven.

Four years, and it takes about seventy percent of what she has, and the thirty percent left over has to cover a job and a marriage and a body that needs managing like a small business.

And she has a list. It is not written down and it is worse for that. Read the Bible properly, not just when you can. Pray for longer than four minutes. Be renewed in your mind. Take every thought captive. Renew your mind, again, because that one is on the list twice under different wordings.

She has been failing that list for four years and she is exhausted by it in a way that is separate from being exhausted, and it is the second exhaustion that is finishing her.

And on the step, with a plate on her knee, she thinks the thing she thinks most evenings, which is: even the spiritual part has become work I cannot do.

If you have a list like that, you know nobody handed it to you on paper, and you know exactly which item you failed today.

Read the voice of the verb

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 seventy percent. It is the second exhaustion. It costs you the one part of your life that was supposed to be rest, which has become the last item on a list of things you are behind on. It costs the four minutes of praying, which are real and which you have decided do not count. It costs you the Bible, functionally, because opening it now starts with an apology. And it costs you a sentence on a step with a plate on your knee, which nobody on that porch has any idea you are carrying.

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 four 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 exhaustion has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking these five would have easier evenings without one of them managing you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your husband, one of the four on the steps, 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 bring a plate out and sit down on a step.

Now, Romans 12, and read the voice of the verbs, because that is the whole of it.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.Romans 12:2

Be ye transformed.

That is a passive. In the Greek it is unmistakable and in English it survives if you slow down: not transform yourself, but be transformed. It is something happening to a person, and Paul's instruction is to let it happen rather than to perform it.

You are the object of that verb and you were never the workforce. Romans 12:2 puts the transforming in the passive, and the Holy Spirit is the one named all through that letter as the agent of exactly this.

Now the phrase people turn into a task: by the renewing of your mind. That is the instrument, not the assignment. Paul is saying what the transformation happens by means of, and if you go back four chapters he has already said who does the renewing, because Romans 8 is where the Spirit does the work in a person, repeatedly, in verbs that the person is not the subject of.

So the item on your list is a description of God's activity that somebody converted into a chore. You did not invent that conversion. It is in the air in most churches, and it has been costing you for four years.

You have been failing at something that was never issued to you as a task. That is written into Romans 12:2, and His Spirit in you is the one who does the renewing the verse names.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because four years of good teaching has already been received on that porch.

It does not say nothing is asked of you. There are imperatives in that chapter and they are real. Present your bodies. Do not be conformed. Those are things a person does, and Romans 12:1 says so plainly, and this is not an argument that nothing at all is asked. The Holy Spirit does the renewing; He has never said the room is empty.

And it does not tell you the four years are changing, and it makes no promise about your body or your seventy percent, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And this renewing is not a compensation. Nothing in Romans offers a renewed mind in exchange for a diminished body, and if that trade has ever been suggested to you, it was wrong. Both things are true at once and neither is payment for the other.

You were never asked to manufacture the thing that is being done to you. Scripture puts it in the passive and names the Spirit as the agent, and the same Spirit is the one who carries that onto a step on a warm evening.