Given Or Worked Out

Priya has stopped trusting all of it, and she can date the stopping to a Tuesday about three years ago.

Somebody at her church had said something to her about a situation, and Priya had known immediately what was underneath it, and had been right, and had been quietly helpful about it for months afterwards.

And then, weeks later, she was describing it to her sister and heard herself say it just came to me.

And her sister, who is a nurse and means no harm, said: well, you had met her four times and she had told you about her mother, so you had most of it.

That was all. Her sister moved on to something else. Priya has not.

Because she went back over it and her sister was right. She had met the woman four times. There had been a conversation about her mother. Any reasonably attentive person putting those together would have got somewhere near where Priya got.

So: given, or worked out?

She could not tell. And that would have been survivable as a question about one incident, except that once she started asking it she could not stop, and she has now gone back through eleven years of these things and cannot cleanly classify a single one.

There is always something. A detail she had heard. A face she had seen. An overheard half sentence from a fortnight before. Never enough to make the conclusion obvious, always enough to make the conclusion possible.

So she has stopped acting on any of it, and she is fifty, and the stopping has been quiet enough that nobody has noticed.

You may know that Tuesday.

Maybe you have been through your own list too, looking for one clean case, and found that every single one has a plausible ordinary route into it if you look hard enough.

Nobody gets a clean case

Let me say the structural thing first, because it will save you another three years.

There is no clean case. Not for you, and not for anybody else who has ever had one of these.

A thing that arrives in a human head arrives in a head that has been in the world, that has met people, that has heard things and seen faces and noticed tones of voice. There is no chamber in a person where a piece of information can land uncontaminated by everything else already in there.

Which means the test you have been applying is one that nothing could pass, and the eleven years came out inconclusive not because they were dubious but because the question has no clean instances anywhere.

And you are not looking at eleven years of dubious cases. The written word never once describes a person receiving something in a state of sterile isolation, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been auditing a decade.

And you are not required to separate what He gave from what you noticed. The word describes God searching the heart and giving to whom He will, and never asks the recipient to produce a chain of custody, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than certifying provenance.

The verse about the mirror

There is a sentence in the middle of the love chapter that people read as being about heaven, and it is also a working description of now.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.1 Corinthians 13:12

Now I know in part.

Not: some people know in part and others know clearly. Not: you will know clearly once you have got the discernment right. Paul puts himself in it, in the same paragraph where he has just described having all knowledge, and he says partial is what now is.

And notice that he does not treat this as a problem to be solved before anything can be used. The whole chapter is about how to behave while it is true, and the answer he gives is not better epistemology. It is charity.

Which means the murkiness you have been trying to clear is not a defect in your equipment. It is the stated condition of the age, and everybody operating in it is operating in it.

And you know in part and that is the normal condition rather than your failure. The word says now we see through a glass, darkly, and puts Paul inside the sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a diminishment.

And nothing about you is under review for three years of not acting. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman whose stopping was quiet enough that nobody noticed.

The question that is actually answerable

So here is a better question than the one you have been asking, and it has the advantage of having an answer.

Not: was this given or worked out?

But: is this useful, and can I carry it without harming anybody?

That question can be answered. It can be answered about every one of the eleven years, and about the next one, and the answer does not require you to establish anything about the origin.

And notice what happens to the stakes. If a thing was given, it should be held carefully and used to help somebody. If a thing was worked out by an attentive woman who had met somebody four times and listened properly, it should also be held carefully and used to help somebody.

The handling is identical. Which means the classification you have been unable to make was never load-bearing.

And what you were given is for helping somebody either way. The word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, and it names the purpose rather than requiring the pedigree, and the Spirit is the one who makes that the operative question.

And you are able to act on something you cannot classify. The word says charity beareth all things, believeth all things, and it describes a way of proceeding under uncertainty rather than a method for ending it, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that.