It Looks Worse Than When I Started

It is worse than it was.

That is not a feeling and it is not pessimism. It is an accurate description. In March there was a tired room. Now there is a torn up room with the floor covered and half the fittings off and a pile of things in the middle that have nowhere to go.

Anybody walking in would agree with you. It is objectively worse.

And out of that, quietly, over a few weeks, a conclusion has formed. The conclusion is that this was a mistake. That the room was fine and you have made it not fine, and that the sensible thing would have been to leave it alone.

That conclusion is doing a great deal of damage, and it is built on one hidden assumption that has never been examined.

The assumption is that a project should improve monotonically. That every week ought to be better than the week before, and that any week which is worse is a week of going backward.

Nothing in the world works that way. Nothing that involves taking something apart in order to put it together has ever worked that way, and it is worth having that said plainly to you tonight.

You are a woman standing in the middle of something, and a room that is worse than it was has never once meant you were wrong to begin.

Beauty for ashes

There is a line in Isaiah about exchange, and the thing to notice is that the ashes are real.

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. (Isaiah 61:3, King James Version)

Beauty for ashes.

The line is usually read for the beauty, which is fair enough. But look at what is being exchanged, and look at the fact that the ashes are not denied anywhere in the sentence.

They are ashes. Nobody in that verse is told that they are not really ashes, or that if they looked at them properly they would see something else. The ashes are granted, named, and then exchanged.

You have ashes that are granted rather than argued with, and a stage that is genuinely worse has never once needed to be reinterpreted before anything could happen. Isaiah 61:3 names the ashes plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a mercy rather than a discouragement.

And notice the shape of all three pairs. Beauty for ashes. Oil of joy for mourning. A garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness.

In every one of them, the difficult thing is stated first and stated honestly. The verse does not begin with the good outcome and mention the difficulty as an aside. It starts where the person actually is.

You were met where the room actually is, and a promise that begins by naming the ashes has never once been a promise that minimizes them. The Spirit of God is the one who starts from the true state of a thing, and the written word puts the ashes and the mourning and the heaviness in the sentence by name.

Torn up is a stage and not a verdict

So here is the practical claim, and it is the whole of the article.

You are inside a structural stage and not a warning, and the part between taking apart and putting together has never once been a sign of incompetence. Every job that involves opening something up has a stage where the thing is worse than it was, and that stage is not a warning about anybody. Isaiah 61:3 names the ashes as a real state rather than a mistaken one, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows what lies between the two halves of a job.

A room being stripped looks like a room being ruined. From a photograph, at that moment, you could not tell the two apart, and neither could anybody else.

You are in a stage that looks identical to a disaster from the outside, and a torn up room has never once been distinguishable from a ruined one in a single glance. Isaiah 61:3 grants the ashes rather than explaining them away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows the difference between an exchange in progress and a loss.

And here is the specific damage the wrong conclusion does.

If the conclusion is that this was a mistake, then every hour spent in that room from here is an hour spent compounding a mistake. Nobody works willingly on something they believe they should not have begun.

So the wrong conclusion does not make a person sad. It makes them stop, which is far more expensive, and it stops them in the one stage where stopping leaves the room at its worst permanently.

You have been drawing a conclusion that would keep anybody out of that room, and a mistaken reading of a stage has never once been the same as a mistaken decision to begin. The Spirit of God is the one who corrects a reading without correcting a person, and Isaiah 61:3 begins with the ashes and moves from there.

And one more, because this row cannot end in a promise about the room. Nothing here says how it turns out.

You have a stage that is honestly named tonight, and the naming of it has never once required anybody to tell you how it ends. Isaiah 61:3 speaks of an exchange rather than of a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the room while it is still ashes.

Photograph the worst corner

Here is the assignment and it will feel like exactly the wrong thing to do.

Photograph the worst corner of the room tonight, and do not delete it.

The worst corner. Not a flattering angle. The pile, the stripped wall, the fittings in a box on the floor.

You have a photograph available tonight that costs nothing, and a picture of the worst part has never once made the worst part any worse. Isaiah 61:3 names the ashes without softening them, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that room while somebody photographs the mess on purpose.

Here is why. Right now you cannot tell whether that room is getting better, because the only comparison available is with what it looked like before you started, and that comparison will always come out badly during this stage.

A photograph gives you a second reference point. In three weeks the comparison stops being with March and starts being with tonight, and that comparison will tell you something true.

And there is a second reason, which is quieter. Photographing it is a refusal to hide it, and a thing photographed on purpose stops carrying the particular sting that an unrecorded mess carries.

Then put the phone away and do nothing else. That is all this evening is for.