About Somebody I Do Not Like

Charmaine got it about eleven days ago and it is about a woman she has never got on with.

That is the difficulty and she saw it immediately. It came the way things come to her, which is quickly and while she is doing something else, and it was specific, and if she had received it about anybody else in that building she would have taken it seriously without a second thought.

But it is about that woman.

And Charmaine has spent eleven days unable to get past a question she cannot answer, which is whether she would have been as sure about it if it had arrived about somebody she loved.

She has tested it, in the ways available. She has asked herself whether the thing is flattering to her, and it is not particularly. She has asked whether it is the sort of thing she has said about that woman before, and it is not; it is a different sort of thing entirely and it took her by surprise. She has asked whether she wants it to be true, and the honest answer is that she does not, and she noticed the honest answer with some relief, and then noticed that the relief itself was suspicious.

That is where she has been living for eleven days. In a hall of mirrors, checking her own motives, and finding that every check she performs is itself performed by the thing under investigation.

She is fifty-one and she has told nobody, which is at least something.

You may know the mirrors.

Maybe you also had something arrive about a person you already had feelings about. Maybe you have also been trying to verify yourself with yourself, and found out that the instrument and the subject are the same object.

The verse everybody quotes, and the sentence after it

There is a line in Jeremiah that gets used to make people feel bad, and the sentence immediately after it is the one that helps.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways.Jeremiah 17:9-10

Read them together, because they are one thought and they are almost never quoted together.

The first sentence asks a question: who can know it? And it is a real question with an implied answer, and the implied answer is nobody. Not your neighbor, not your pastor, and specifically not you about yourself.

The second sentence answers it. I the LORD search the heart.

Which means the eleven days you have spent trying to audit your own motives were an attempt to do a job that the text says one person does, and that person is not you, and the reason it says so is not that you are especially compromised. It says so about everybody.

And you are not the one who can search your own heart, and that is a relief rather than a verdict. The written word asks who can know it and then names who does, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman eleven days into a hall of mirrors.

And you are not required to certify your own motive before you are allowed to hold something. The word gives the searching to Him, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing you a clearance you could never issue yourself.

The question you cannot answer, and why

Now let me be plain about the mirrors, because I think you have suspected this and been unable to prove it.

You cannot answer the question. Not because you are unusually deceived, but because self-verification does not work in principle. The checking is done by the same apparatus that is under suspicion, so a clean result and a contaminated result look identical from the inside.

This is not a spiritual failing. It is a structural fact, and philosophers have been stuck on it for a very long time, and it is why the verse hands the searching upward.

Which means eleven days of testing has produced exactly as much certainty as eleven minutes would have, and eleven months would produce the same, and the reason you feel no closer is that there is no closer available on that road.

And you can stop performing an audit that was never possible. The word says who can know it and expects the answer nobody, and the Spirit is the one who ends an investigation that had no possible verdict.

And nothing about you is under review for having feelings about somebody. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who noticed her own relief and immediately suspected it.

What to do with a thing you cannot certify

So here is the practical part, and it follows from the impossibility rather than around it.

If you cannot establish whether a thing was given or generated, then the only safe way to carry it is in a form where being wrong costs almost nothing.

Which is precisely what writing it down and telling nobody achieves.

Announced, it needs to be true, and the pressure to be right will start bending your reading of everything that woman does. Written down and put away, it can be either, and you can go on being decent to her, and if it turns out to have been your own opinion in better clothes then the only person who ever knew is you.

That is not cowardice and it is not burying anything. It is the correct handling of a thing whose provenance cannot be established, which is most things of this kind.

And you are able to hold it without deciding what it is. The word says charity thinketh no evil, and it does not require you to have resolved a question first before you can behave well, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that toward somebody you have never got on with.