How Good Being Right Felt

Idris found out on a Thursday, about eight months after, and the first thing he felt was not compassion.

He wants to be exact about this because the exactness is the whole point. There was a man in their community about whom Idris had had a thought, two years ago, out of nowhere, in the middle of doing something else. It was specific. It was not a suspicion and it was not the sort of thing you deduce; it arrived, whole, and it was about a situation Idris had no way of knowing anything about.

He did what he now thinks was the right thing, which is that he told nobody and prayed about it for a while and then let it go.

Then, eight months ago, the situation came out. Not through him. And it was, in its essentials, exactly what he had had in his head two years before.

He heard about it standing in a doorway with a cup in his hand.

And what went through him, in the first second and a half, before anything else arrived at all, was a small hot flare of something that he can only describe as vindication.

I knew.

The compassion came. He would want that recorded. About four seconds later there was real grief for the man and for the people around him, and Idris has been quietly useful to two of them since, and he has never once mentioned the two years.

But the first second and a half is what he cannot put down.

He is forty-six. And what he has been carrying since that Thursday is not guilt exactly. It is a question about what the thing in him is actually for, if the first response it produces in him is pleasure at accuracy.

You may know that doorway.

Maybe you have been right about something too. Maybe nobody knows. And maybe you have never told anybody what the first second felt like.

The sentence Paul makes it survive

There is a verse where Paul lists the most impressive things a person could have and then does something startling with the list.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.1 Corinthians 13:2

All knowledge. He is not describing a person with a bit of insight. He is describing the maximum.

And he does not say such a person is diminished, or less useful, or in need of some balancing. He says I am nothing, and he puts himself in the sentence rather than aiming it at somebody else, which is worth noticing.

Now read what he does not say. He does not say the knowledge was fake. He does not say it was not from God. He does not tell the person to stop having it, or to doubt it, or to hand it back.

The knowledge stands. What is at stake is what it amounts to, and that turns entirely on one thing sitting beside it.

And what you were given was real and the first second does not unmake it. The written word leaves the knowledge standing and puts the whole question on what accompanies it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man in a doorway with a cup.

And you are not disqualified by having noticed how it felt. The word puts the warning in the first person and never once tells the knower to stop knowing, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than confiscating anything.

The second and a half

Now let me deal with the thing itself, because I do not think you should be talked out of taking it seriously and I also do not think you should be crushed by it.

A flare of vindication is what happens in a human being when something they held privately turns out to be true. It is nearly involuntary. It happens to people about parking spaces and football results, and the fact that it happened to you about something serious is not evidence of a corrupt heart. It is evidence of a nervous system.

What matters is not the second and a half. It is what the second and a half is allowed to become over years.

Because vindication, fed, turns into a taste. And a person with a taste for being right about people starts, without ever deciding to, to want the material. Not consciously. But the thoughts come more often, and they get sharper, and they start being about people he already has views on.

You are not there. The evidence that you are not there is that you told nobody for two years and have been quietly useful to two people since and have never mentioned it.

And you are holding it carefully and that is what the carefulness is for. The word says charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that alongside the knowing rather than instead of it.

And nothing about you is under review for a second and a half. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been honest with himself about something nobody would ever have found out.

What it is for

One more thing, and it is the practical half.

You asked what the faculty is for, if that is the first thing it produces.

Look at what you actually did with it. Two years of silence. Prayer. And then, when it broke, quiet usefulness to two people who needed somebody who was not shocked.

That is what it was for, and it did that, and the fact that a flare went through you on the way does not change what the thing accomplished.

And the discipline that made it possible was the silence. Not because silence is always right, and I am not laying down a rule about every situation, but because a thing held and not announced cannot be weaponized, and a thing announced early cannot be unannounced.

And what you are given is for helping somebody. The word puts charity beside the knowledge as the thing that makes it amount to anything, and the Spirit is the one who aims a faculty that has no aim of its own.