It Is Just How I Am

The second one was a Thursday and it took about eleven seconds, and he was in the van by half past two.

He is not a violent man. He wants that understood and it is true; there has never been a hand raised and never will be. What there is, about four or five times a year, is a moment where something goes and a sentence comes out that cannot be taken back, and the temperature of it frightens people who have never seen it before.

Eleven seconds. Then about eleven hours of the other thing, which nobody outside ever sees, which is him sitting in a van in a lay-by feeling as though he has been hollowed out.

Two jobs. The first one they were decent about and called it a mutual thing. The second one was not mutual.

And there is a sentence he says, and he has said it for about twenty years, and he says it lightly and even a bit proudly when he is with people who know him.

It is just how I am.

He is not lying. It genuinely feels like a description. It arrived from somewhere in his teens and it has been running ever since, and by now it has done something much bigger than describe him. It has excused him, and it has closed the subject, and it has quietly told him that there is nothing available except managing the damage afterwards.

That is you, and the sentence is doing more work than the temper is.

Four things before we go on

The first. If anybody in your house is frightened of you, that is the first thing, before this page and before anything on it. Get help today, from people who work with exactly this. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it never was, and nothing here is a substitute for it.

The second. Nothing on this page is going to tell you that this would have gone by now if you believed properly. There is no verse anywhere that prices change by somebody's intensity of faith, and if there were, the whole book would be crueller than it is.

The third. There are people whose entire profession is this, and going to them is not an admission of anything except that a man wants his life back.

The fourth. I am not going to promise you that it goes. God may do exactly what you are asking, and He may do it slowly, and He may do it through the third thing on this list, and none of that is a report card on you.

You are not carrying this because you did not want it enough. Scripture says God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, 1 Corinthians 10:13, and the faithfulness sits on His side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a lay-by at three in the afternoon.

The verse is about a transplant, not an effort

There is a promise in Ezekiel that is worth going slowly over because of what kind of promise it is.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Count the verbs and look at who owns them. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give again. Four actions, all of them God's, and the person receiving is not described as doing anything at all.

This is not a passage about self-improvement. Nobody in it is being told to work on themselves. It is the language of a transplant: something removed and something else put in, by somebody else's hands.

And notice what is being replaced. Not the person. The stony heart, which is one thing in them, taken out and swapped, while the person remains the person.

That distinction is the whole of this article. God does not treat what needs changing in a man as though it were the man.

You are not the thing that needs replacing. Scripture says I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh, Ezekiel 36:26, and the Holy Spirit is named two verses later as the one put within, and He does the work rather than supervising yours.

The sentence is the trap

Now the thing I would change first, and it is not the temper.

It is just how I am.

Say it out loud once and hear what it actually claims. Not that you have a pattern. Not that you have a real difficulty with a specific and recurring shape. It claims that this is your nature, and a nature is not a thing anybody addresses, because a nature is what you are. Scripture stands under that in Ezekiel 36:26, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

That sentence has done three jobs for twenty years and every one of them has cost you.

It has protected you, which is why it has survived: if it is how you are, then the eleven seconds are weather rather than an event, and nobody can reasonably ask you to do anything about weather. It is written, in Ezekiel 36:26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

It has closed the subject. Nobody argues with a nature.

And it has told you, quietly, every single time you have said it, that there is nothing available to you except cleaning up afterwards.

You are not a nature that has to be endured. 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, and the Holy Spirit does not revise a person's status on the strength of a Thursday.

The eleven hours

There is something in your account that almost nobody sees, and it deserves saying plainly.

The eleven seconds are the part everybody knows about. The eleven hours afterwards are the part nobody does, and they are the reason I do not think you are the man that sentence describes. Scripture settles that in Ezekiel 36:26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Men who genuinely think it is just how they are do not sit in lay-bys feeling hollowed out. They shrug and go home. What you are carrying afterwards, and have been for twenty years, is the strongest evidence available that the description is wrong. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Ezekiel 36:26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

The remorse is not a punishment loop. It is a signal, and it has been going off reliably for two decades in a man who has been telling himself the alarm system is not there.

You are not indifferent to this, and that is worth more than you have ever given it credit for. Scripture says a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise, Psalm 51:17, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling you that the eleven hours are just what men like you do.