Somebody Who Does Not Finish

At some point it stopped being a pattern and became a fact about you.

That is the move I want to look at, because it happened quietly and it changed everything. For years it was a series of separate events. This one ended. That one ended. And then somewhere along the line the events got summed up into a description, and the description got filed, and now when the subject comes up you do not think about attempts, you think about what kind of man you are.

I am somebody who does not finish things. You have said it out loud. Probably with a bit of a laugh, in a self-deprecating way, at a table with people who thought you were being humble.

Once a thing becomes character rather than history, nothing can be done about it. That is the point of a description. History can change. Character is what you are stuck with.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. Every one of the events that got summed into that description was a real attempt, made with real hope, at real cost, and you got up afterward every time. A man who does not care does not accumulate a history like that. He has nothing to sum up.

So this page will not ask you to finish something to prove the description wrong. That is a trap, and you have already fallen into it more than once.

I want to go after the description itself, and I want to do it with a verse about who does the finishing.

A description is not a diagnosis

Consider how that description was arrived at, because the method is not sound.

You took a set of endings, all of which happened in different years under different conditions, and you drew a line through them. That is not analysis, that is pattern matching, and pattern matching is what a mind does when it is tired. The endings had causes. Every one of them had a cause, and the causes were mostly outside you, and none of them were the same cause twice.

You have a history rather than a nature, and no run of endings has ever once added up to a description of a man. Philippians 1:6 says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence about somebody else's competence land on a man's self-assessment.

And notice the strange comfort in the description. It settles things. As long as you are somebody who does not finish, nothing is expected, and nothing being expected is a kind of rest, even though it is the most expensive rest there is.

You were taking shelter in a description, and it has never once been the truth about you. The written word says the good work was begun by God and will be performed by God, which removes the whole subject from the department of character, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that removal feel like relief rather than like being let off.

He which hath begun

Paul writes it as confidence, and confidence about somebody else.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6, King James Version)

Read the subject of every verb. He began. He will perform. The person the letter is addressed to is not the actor anywhere in that sentence.

Paul is confident, and his confidence is not in the Philippians. He tells them so. His confidence is in the one who started the work, and the reason he can be confident is that the finishing was never assigned to them.

You are not the one responsible for the finishing, and it has never once been handed to you as your department. Philippians 1 puts the beginning and the completing in God's hands in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that stop being a doctrine about salvation and start being a Tuesday.

And notice what is called good. The work. Not the outcome, not the performance, not the run of good days. The work itself, which is God's, and which was good from the first day.

You have a good work in you that you did not start, and no ending of yours has ever once interrupted its author. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a man aware of something running in him that he did not begin, and the written word says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it.

What to do with a description you cannot disprove

Now the part I came to say, and it is going to sound like the wrong advice.

Do not try to disprove it. That has been tried. Finishing something in order to demonstrate the opposite is a project built on the description, which means the description is still in charge whether you succeed or not.

What you can do instead is much smaller and completely effective. Do something badly. On purpose. Something that does not resolve, does not conclude, does not count as evidence in either direction.

You are free to do something without it being evidence, and no small act of yours has ever once been required to testify about your character. The written word says the performing belongs to God, which takes the evidentiary weight off everything you do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can make an unremarkable act genuinely unremarkable.

And here is the reason that works when the big projects have not. A description survives on being tested. It does not survive on being ignored. The moment a man does an ordinary thing that is not about the description, the description has nothing to feed on.

You have the freedom to stop feeding it, and God has never once been waiting on a demonstration from you. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a man out of a courtroom he built himself, and Philippians 1:6 is the written word underneath it, where the confidence is in the one who began the work and not in the one it is being done in.