Eleven Times Deleted

The deleting has a shape now and it always happens at about the same time of night.

He does it properly. Not just off the home screen: into the settings, clear the data, then the account, then the password out of the manager so that reinstalling means starting again from the beginning. He has got very good at it. It takes about four minutes.

And there is a feeling afterwards, for maybe an hour, that is nearly worth the whole thing. Clean. Decided. He usually goes to bed early on those nights.

Thursday is when it usually comes back. Sometimes Friday. Twice it has been the same night, and those are the two he does not think about.

Eleven times.

He knows it is eleven because after the eighth he started counting, and he could not tell you why he started counting except that somewhere around the eighth the deleting stopped feeling like progress and started feeling like a thing he does.

That is the change, and it is the whole reason for this page. The first three times he was a man dealing with a problem. By the eleventh he has begun to suspect he is a man who deletes things, and that the deleting is not the cure but the ritual, and that a person who has done this eleven times is probably going to do it a twelfth.

Nobody knows. Not one person. Which means every single one of those eleven began and ended inside one head.

That is you, and the eleventh is not what you think it is.

What this page will not say

Let me clear the ground, because you have probably heard some of this and it did damage. Scripture settles that in Romans 6:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Nothing here is going to suggest you did not want it enough. Eleven deletions is not the record of a man who does not want it. It is the record of a man who has wanted it eleven times, at real cost, at eleven in the evening, on his own.

Nothing here is going to suggest that if you believed properly it would have gone by now. There is no verse anywhere in which freedom is priced by the intensity of somebody's belief, and if there were, the whole book would be a different and much crueller book.

And nothing here is going to hand you a technique. You do not need another method. You have eleven methods. What has gone wrong is not tactical.

You are not carrying this because you have failed at it. Scripture says God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, 1 Corinthians 10:13, and it puts the faithfulness on His side of the sentence rather than making the standing yours to produce, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a room at eleven at night where a man has just cleared a password.

The verse, and the tense it is in

There is a line in Romans that is worth the whole of this, and almost everybody reads it in the wrong tense.

For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.Romans 6:14

People read that as a target. Something to work towards. A description of the man you would be if you could just string enough weeks together.

It is not a target. It is a statement about jurisdiction.

Dominion is a legal word. It is about who has the right to rule, not about who happens to be winning this month. And Paul gives the reason in the second half of the sentence, and the reason has nothing to do with your run of form: you are not under the law but under grace. The change of government is the ground; the behavior is downstream of it. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Romans 6:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Which means the eleventh time did not alter the jurisdiction. It was a Thursday inside a country that already changed hands.

You are not under the rule of this thing, whatever Thursday looked like. Scripture says sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law but under grace, Romans 6:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a legal fact into something a man can actually stand on at the end of a bad week.

What the counting did

Now the part that has done the real damage, and it is not the app.

Somewhere around the eighth you began counting, and counting turned an event into an identity.

One deletion is a man dealing with something. Eleven deletions, counted, is a pattern, and a pattern feels like a description of a person. And once it is a description, the whole thing changes character: you are no longer someone with a problem, you are someone who is like this, and people who are like this do not stop, and so the twelfth becomes not a possibility but a forecast. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Romans 6:14, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

That forecast is not from God and it is not from Scripture and it did not come from the evidence either. It came from arithmetic done at midnight by an exhausted man.

You are not a man who is like this. Scripture says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, 2 Corinthians 5:17, and it does not put a probationary period or a clean run in front of that anywhere, and the Holy Spirit does not revise a person's status on the basis of a Thursday.

Nobody knows, and that is the actual problem

Here is the thing I would change first if I could change one thing.

Eleven times, and not one other person on earth knows.

That is not incidental. That is the engine. A thing that lives entirely inside one head has no friction against it at all, and the deleting and the reinstalling and the shame and the counting all happen in a closed room with nobody else in it, which is exactly the condition under which this survives.

I am not going to tell you to announce it. One person. Somebody who will not flinch and will not lecture and will not make it their project. It does not have to be somebody from a church and it does not have to be a professional, although if it has a grip that frightens you then people who work with exactly this exist and going to them is not a lesser road than praying, and it never was.

You are not meant to be doing this in a sealed room. Scripture says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed, James 5:16, and notice that the healing in that verse is attached to the telling rather than to the effort, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets nine words out of a man who has said nothing for eleven rounds.