The Marks on the Door Frame

The frame is soft pine and it has been painted four times, and every coat has been carefully cut around the marks.

There are eleven of them. Little horizontal dashes in pencil, some in biro where the pencil had gone missing, each with initials beside it and a date in a different hand each year, because whoever happened to be holding the pen did the writing. The lowest one is at the height of a kitchen bin. The highest is above the light switch. Between them is a boy called Danny, measured every August by an aunt who insists on it, standing very straight with his heels against the skirting and his chin up while somebody lays a wooden spoon flat on his head.

Danny has never once felt himself grow.

That is the thing about him and the door frame. He can tell you exactly what he had for lunch on any given day and nothing about being taller. There was no evening when his legs announced anything. He did not lie in bed feeling his shins lengthen. He got up, put on the same shoes until the day they hurt, went to school, came home, and lived at what felt to him like a constant and unchanging height. And every August he stood against the paint, and every August his aunt made a sound of astonishment and pressed the pencil to the wood, and Danny turned round and looked at the new mark and the old one and felt precisely the same amount of nothing he had felt all year.

Once, when he was nine, he said so. He said: I don't think that's right, I haven't grown. And his aunt, who had eleven marks' worth of patience, said the only thing there is to say to that. She said: love, the wall is not asking you.

You have been standing against a door frame for about a year now.

People keep making that sound. The one your aunt made. They say it at the school gate and on the phone and across a table, and they use the same three or four words every time: you seem so much better. You are so much calmer than you were. I could not have said this to you last year. And you smile, and you say thank you, and something in your chest goes very quiet and very careful, because you cannot feel a single thing they are describing.

You still brace when the phone rings. You still do the check at two in the morning to make sure the thing that ended has actually ended. You still hold your shoulders somewhere near your ears. From where you are standing, absolutely nothing has moved since the worst of it, and the kindest people in your life keep telling you it has, and you have started to wonder which of you is lying.

Neither of you is lying. You are just the only one in the room who cannot see the wall.

The farmer goes to bed

Let me put something in your hands, because I think you have been trying to solve this with the wrong instrument.

You have been using your feelings as a gauge. That is not a foolish thing to do and it is not a failure of faith. It is simply the only instrument most of us are ever handed, and nobody told you it does not measure this. Mark 4:27 has a farmer sleeping while the seed springs up, and it says plainly that he knows not how, which is the Spirit telling you that not being able to trace the process is normal rather than damning. So when the gauge reads zero, you conclude the tank is empty, and the conclusion feels like honesty. It feels like refusing to flatter yourself. But an instrument reading zero on a thing it was never built to detect is not evidence of absence. It is evidence of the wrong instrument.

Now hear what Jesus said about how the kingdom of God actually grows in a person, because He addressed this exact problem and He addressed it with a farmer and a bed.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.Mark 4:26-27

Stay with the middle line, because it is doing all the work. He sleeps and rises night and day. That is not a man watching. That is a man living an ordinary, unremarkable, unmonitored life. He goes to bed. He gets up. He does it again. He is not out in the field at midnight with a lamp checking whether anything has happened, and the parable does not scold him for that, and it does not tell him to try harder at noticing.

And then the four words that ought to be laid over the whole of this last year of yours: he knows not how.

The growing is real. The growing is definite. The parable is not in any doubt about the growing. And the growing is invisible to the man in whose field it is happening. Not hidden from him as a punishment. Not withheld from him because he did not believe adequately. Simply not the kind of thing a person sees from where a person stands.

So here is what I want to say plainly, in case nobody has said it to you in a year.

The absence of evidence inside you was never evidence of absence in you.

You have been reading your own numbness as a verdict, and it is not a verdict. It is the ordinary condition of a field. The seed under six inches of soil has no sensation of sprouting. The stem does not experience itself lengthening. That is Mark 4:27 word for word, and the Holy Spirit keeps the growth going in a person who can feel none of it. And you, sitting in your kitchen with your shoulders still up round your ears, have exactly as much access to what God has been doing in you as that farmer had to the wheat, which is to say almost none, and it never slowed the wheat down by a single day.

And notice what this does to the other pressure you have been under, the one that comes wrapped in kindness. Your friends' observations are not the proof either. They are lovely and they mean well and they are looking at the outside of a house whose rooms they cannot enter. If their word were the ground you stood on, you would be measuring yourself with a different faulty instrument, one held by somebody else. The wall is not asking you and it is not asking them.

The wall is a record. Somebody else keeps the record.