Performance Or Drift

When she keeps it, she can hear herself doing it.

Every word. The particular rhythm of a thing being performed by somebody who is entirely alone in a room, which is the strangest kind of performance there is, because there is no audience and it happens anyway.

So she stops.

And when she stops, there is nothing there at all. Not freedom, not spontaneity. Nothing. Whole weeks go by and she could not tell you afterwards what happened in any of them.

Performance or drift. Those are the two.

She has been swapping between them for about six years and she has tried, honestly, every method anybody has ever recommended to her. She has read the books. She has asked two people she respects. She has done the recommended thing for the recommended length of time.

Here is the conclusion she has come to, and it is the reason this has become heavy rather than merely frustrating.

She has decided the methods are fine and she is the problem.

That something in her is off. That other people find a third state, the one everybody talks about, where a shape holds something living inside it, and she cannot, and after six years of failing to she has concluded it is not the methods.

She has never said that to anybody. It sounds, out loud, like fishing for reassurance, and she is not fishing. She has genuinely worked it out and she genuinely believes it and it has settled in.

If those are your two states, come and sit on the stile a minute. There is a flask and nobody out here is going to recommend anything.

The two words He joined with an and

There is a conversation at a well where the whole question of how to worship comes up, and the answer is two words in one sentence.

But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.John 4:23-24

In spirit and in truth.

He says it twice, in two consecutive verses, and both times the two words are joined with an and.

Truth is the fixed part. It is what is actually so, and it does not move because a person's week was hard. It has content and it has a shape, and it is the same on the days you feel nothing.

Spirit is the living part. It is what is actually happening in a person, now, in the room.

And He does not offer a choice. There is no version where one of them will do. Every attempt to worship with only one of the two is exactly what you have described: truth without spirit is performance, and spirit without truth is drift, and you have been alternating between two halves of one sentence.

You are being handed a third state that Christ named by joining the two words you have been choosing between. John 4:24 says in spirit and in truth and repeats it in consecutive verses, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named at the head of that same sentence as what God is, which means what you have been unable to find has a name in the book and it is not a temperament.

Why every method failed

Now the six years, because there is a reason the methods did not work and it is not you.

Almost every method available is a method for one half.

The ones that give you a shape are truth methods. They are excellent at the fixed part, and if you use one on its own you will end up performing, because a shape with nothing living in it is a performance and there is no other outcome available.

The ones that tell you to be free and spontaneous are spirit methods. They are excellent at the living part, and on their own they produce drift, because there is nothing for the life to happen inside.

You did not fail at either. You succeeded at both, separately, and got exactly what each one produces on its own.

You have been running two half methods correctly and blaming yourself for the result. John 4:24 puts both words in one requirement and refuses to separate them, and it is the Holy Spirit named in that verse, which means the outcome you kept getting was a property of the method rather than a fact about the woman using it.

What she decided about herself

Here is the belief, and it should be dealt with plainly.

Something in me is off.

That is a conclusion drawn from evidence. It is not self pity and it is not fishing, and it is the sort of thing a thoughtful person concludes after six years of honest attempts.

You were never the fault in the equation, and six years of accurate evidence pointed at the wrong thing. Psalm 139:14 says I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and it is written by somebody speaking about their own construction rather than about anybody else's, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things, which means the verdict you passed on how you are made has never had anything under it.