He Is Not Comparing You to Her

The photograph has been on the fridge for six years and it is held up by a magnet shaped like a lemon.

She is seventeen in it. Hair wrong, sunburnt, arm round a girl whose name she genuinely cannot remember, standing outside a marquee at some camp in a field in Shropshire with her eyes half shut against the light.

Her daughter thinks it is up there because she is fond of it. Her husband has never asked. And she has never told either of them the truth, which is that it is not a memory, it is a measurement, and it has been doing that job for six years.

She looks at it while the kettle goes. She looks at it reaching for the milk. And every time, in about a second and a half, the whole comparison runs: she prayed for an hour without noticing. She would give anything away. She cried at things. You have not cried at anything since the school run in the rain in the spring, and that was about the car.

She is forty-three. She teaches. She has a mother-in-law who is dying slowly and badly. She is not a worse person than that girl by any measure she would apply to somebody else, and she knows that, and it makes not the slightest difference to what happens at half past six in the morning by the fridge.

Paul stops knowing people that way

There is a sentence in Corinthians where Paul describes a change in how he assesses everybody, and it is aimed exactly at what happens by your fridge.

Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.2 Corinthians 5:16

After the flesh means by the old measure. By the visible, the outward, the impressive, the way a person can be sized up and ranked.

And look how far Paul takes it. He says even Christ is not known that way any more. If the old way of measuring is not fit for assessing Jesus, it is certainly not fit for assessing a woman of forty-three against a sunburnt seventeen-year-old in Shropshire.

You have been assessed daily by a method Scripture retired. That is not me being generous with a verse; 2 Corinthians 5:16 says the old way of knowing anybody is finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an apostle's sentence and lays it on a kitchen at half past six.

The girl is not the standard, and she never volunteered

Now let me say something about her, the actual seventeen-year-old, because I think you owe her something and it is not this.

She prayed for an hour without noticing because she had an hour. She gave things away because she had nothing anybody needed. She cried at things because she was seventeen and had not yet had to hold herself together through a decade of other people's emergencies.

None of that is a criticism of her. She was real and God was in that field. But she was never appointed to be your standard, and if you could tell her what job she has been doing on your fridge for six years she would be horrified.

You have installed a judge who was never given the office. The written word says the old assessment is not used any more and hands the new one to Christ, and the Holy Spirit does not run a comparison God has explicitly retired.

And here is the thing I most want you to have. Look at what you are being measured on. Hours available. Emotional availability. Tears. Every single item on that list is a function of a schedule and a nervous system, not of love.

You are nursing a woman through a bad death. That takes something out of a person that no seventeen-year-old has ever had taken out of them, and it does not leave much over for weeping in a marquee. That is not decline. That is what carrying costs.

You are not a diminished version of anybody, and there has never been a downgrade on your file. Scripture says a person in Christ is a new creation with the old measure set aside, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that in a tired woman as much as in a bright one.