Converting the Soul, Not the Mood

The reading takes twenty minutes and the inspection takes about forty seconds, and the inspection is the part that has been doing the damage.

It goes like this. She closes the book. And then, without any decision at all, she checks.

Did anything come? Do I feel differently from ten past seven? Was there a verse that stood out, and if there was, does it still feel like it stood out or has that already gone?

She has been doing this every day for about three years, and she is a fair auditor, and the honest answer is nearly always no. So she goes into her day having just failed an inspection she conducted on herself before eight in the morning.

She is fifty-two, a district nurse, and she is good at assessing things. That is half her job. And she has turned that competence on herself in a place where it has no business operating, and she has never noticed, because assessing is what she does and it does not feel like an activity to her.

What she has concluded, in the way you conclude something over three years without ever deciding it, is that the reading is not taking. That other people's reading takes and hers does not, and that the evidence is in, and the evidence is her own daily inspection.

What the psalm says it does

David lists what the word of God does, and I want you to notice the depth at which every single item operates.

The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.Psalm 19:7-8

Converting the soul. Not adjusting the mood. Converting, which means turning something round, at the level of the soul, which is the deepest thing a person is.

Then look at the others. Making wise. Rejoicing the heart. Enlightening the eyes. Every one of them is a work done to a person at a depth the person cannot see into. Nobody has ever watched their own soul being turned. It does not happen where you can look.

You are being worked on at a level your instrument was never able to reach. That is not me making excuses for three flat years; Psalm 19:7 puts the work in the soul rather than in the feelings, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient list and lays it over a woman conducting an inspection at ten to eight.

What an audit can and cannot see

Now let me speak to the assessor in you, because she is competent and she deserves a straight answer rather than a soothing one.

You know, better than most people, the difference between an observable indicator and an underlying condition. You would never accept a patient's report of how they feel as the whole picture, and you would never dismiss a real change because it had not shown up yet in what somebody could describe.

Apply that standard here. What can your forty-second inspection actually observe? Your emotional state at ten to eight, which is affected by sleep and by what is in the diary and by whether the phone went in the night.

What is Psalm 19 describing? A conversion of the soul.

There is no version of the first that could measure the second, and you would say so instantly about any other case.

You have been reading a surface indicator and concluding things about a depth it cannot see. The written word puts the converting in the soul and the wisdom and the light where a person does not have windows, and the Holy Spirit is the one performing that in a woman who has been marking herself down daily.

And I want to name the cost, because three years is a long time. The inspection has quietly changed what the twenty minutes are for. They were time with God. They have become a test, sat every morning, marked immediately, and failed. And a person cannot love an examiner.

You were never sitting an examination, and no result has ever been recorded anywhere. Scripture describes what the word does to a person rather than what a person must demonstrate, and the Holy Spirit is not the invigilator of a district nurse's mornings.