How Do I Measure Growth?

He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. — Phil 1:6

journal entry, still figuring this out

I've watched this question get answered differently depending on which room you grew up in.

Baptists count souls and baptisms. Methodists watch for holiness, a life visibly getting sanded down. Catholics point to the sacraments, did you show up, did you confess. Reformed guys hand you a doctrine test. All noble. All partial. All still bugging me.

Because lately I don't think the question is "which metric is right." I think the question itself might be the problem.

Here's what I caught myself doing. I'll ask "am I growing" and if I'm honest, half the time it's not worship, it's an audit. Same muscle I use on a P&L. Sit myself down, run the numbers, hand down a verdict. That's not humility. That's the King's chair, just wearing a robe this time.

And Paul wouldn't play that game.

"I do not even judge myself... it is the Lord who judges me" (1 Cor 4:3-4). Paul refused to be his own judge. Not because he didn't examine his life, but because he knew the second he became the judge, he'd become the defendant, the jury, and the guy grading his own test. He wasn't introspective. He didn't spiral inward looking for a verdict. He handed the gavel up and kept walking.

That's the move I keep missing.

The line nobody taught me

Old theology draws a distinction I never got in Sunday school: there's the ground of your standing with God, and there's the evidence of what He's doing in you. Calvin was clear, your confidence never rests on your own progress, that's Christ alone, period. But he also said grace leaves fingerprints you can honestly look at.

So looking isn't the sin. Looking to yourself as the source of the verdict is the sin. Small distinction. Changes everything.

I found out this week how far that distinction reaches past my own soul.

I'm in Naples with Libby right now, just the two of us, and I asked her the dangerous question. How are you experiencing me, and what could I change to help you feel more loved. Her answer was hard to hear. "At times I can feel like you are being critical and harsh."

I'd love to say that was new information. It wasn't. I've heard some version of that before. And my first instinct, the old instinct, was: fine, I'll just stop saying anything. Which is not an answer, it's a pout.

Here's what she was actually naming. She feels judged by me sometimes. And that tracks, because I judge myself constantly. Turns out the verdict-handing-down I do on my own soul doesn't stay contained in there. It leaks. How I relate to the people I love is often just a mirror of how I'm relating to my own interior world. If I'm running an audit on myself, I'm running one on her too, whether I mean to or not.

We want our marriage to be a judgment-free zone. So we made an adjustment. When something feels off in a conversation now, instead of naming the behavior or handing down a verdict, we just say: "When you say that, this is what that does in me." No label, no charge, just the impact. She's not wrong or critical or harsh, here's what happened in me when that landed.

That's so much more freeing than a courtroom. Turns out the chair I keep climbing into with God is the same chair I climb into with my wife.

What the Book actually tests

I went looking for a scoreboard in Scripture. Didn't find one.

1 John is the only book that says outright, I'm writing this so you can know (5:13). And the tests aren't achievements. Obedience. Love for the people around you. Sin loosening its grip, slowly. Not a finish line, a direction you're leaning.

Galatians calls it fruit, singular. One fruit, nine facets, grown by somebody else, on somebody else's clock.

And then Paul again, decades in, having planted half the churches in Asia Minor: I have not arrived (Phil 3:12). If he doesn't get to claim the summit, neither do I. Feeling like I haven't arrived might not be evidence of failure. Might just be evidence I'm standing where every honest believer has always stood.

The question that actually works

John Owen asked the sharpest question I've read all year: where does your mind go when nothing's demanding it? Not what you say in the meeting. Where it drifts on the drive home. That's the test. Not your Instagram caption. Not your prayer voice. Your idle mind.

The part that actually freed me

Newton said something that wrecked me a little. As the light gets brighter, you see more dirt. So real growth often feels like going backward. Grace feels more necessary, not less. Self-satisfaction quietly leaves the building.

Which means the very anxiety that sends me hunting for a growth metric might be the evidence itself. The sin that bothers me more now than it did five years ago isn't proof I'm sliding. Might be proof the light turned up.

Ignatius has a rule I can't shake either. For someone actually moving toward God, the enemy's move isn't temptation, it's gnawing anxious disquiet dressed up as concern. Circling, restless worry about "am I growing" in a guy who clearly wants to grow, Ignatius would call that a red flag, not a virtue.

Dead branches don't wonder if they're bearing fruit.

What I'm doing with this now

Measuring in years, not days. Who was I five years ago when I got wronged. Am I quicker to say sorry. Is there someone I couldn't forgive three years ago I can sit across from now.

Not doing it alone. I can't see my own blind spots. One move: ask two people who've known you for years where they've seen real change, and where they haven't. Then shut up and listen. Or, apparently, ask your wife on vacation and brace yourself.

A daily examen instead of an hourly audit. Thanks, ask for light, look at the day, repent, ask for grace tomorrow. Fifteen minutes. Written down so I have data instead of a mood.

Staying in the means instead of chasing the metric. Word, prayer, community, service. Abide, John says (15:4), and let the fruit show up on its own schedule. Not my project. His work, my cooperation, Phil 2:12-13 in one breath.

Back to the chair

I keep landing here. Every time I try to sit in the judge's seat, over my own soul or over the people closest to me, I've climbed back into a chair that was never mine to sit in.

Asked a couple times a year, with people who'll tell me the truth, this is a healthy question. Asked hourly, alone, trying to manage my own standing with God, it's the self-scrutiny Scripture never asked for, and it crowds out the abiding that actually grows the thing I'm anxious about.

So I'm getting off the throne. Handing the gavel back up. With God, and with Libby.

You were never the one measuring the growth. You were just supposed to stay attached to the vine.