I Can Define It And Cannot Find It

Ilan can distinguish it from four adjacent things and he cannot find one instance of it in himself.

He can tell you what it is not. Not optimism, which is a disposition. Not certainty, which is an epistemic state. Not trust in a general sense, which everybody has about aeroplanes. Not the decision to act as though something is true, which is a policy rather than a condition.

He can give you the distinctions cleanly and people have found them useful, and one of them is in a set of notes that has been passed around a bit.

And when he turns and looks inward for the thing he has just defined, there is nothing there that matches.

He is not in despair about this. He wants that understood. He functions, he prays, he keeps the practices, he would say without hesitation that he belongs to God.

But if you asked him to point at faith in himself, in the sense he has just spent four paragraphs defining, he would have to say that he cannot, and that he has looked properly, and that the looking has been going on since about his mid twenties.

He is forty-one.

And there is a suspicion under it that has grown slowly and that he has never said out loud: that his facility with the definition is itself the evidence. That a man who genuinely had the thing would not be able to specify it so cleanly, and that clean specification is what you get instead of the thing.

You may know that study.

Maybe you can also define it. Maybe you have also looked inward for the thing you defined and found nothing that matches. And maybe you have wondered whether the defining is what you got instead.

The request and the answer that does not fit it

There is an exchange in Luke where the apostles ask for something quantitative and Jesus answers in a way that does not address the quantity at all.

And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith. And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.Luke 17:5-6

They ask for more. He answers with the smallest seed anybody in that room could picture.

And notice what He does not do. He does not increase it. He does not tell them how to increase it. He does not agree that their quantity is the problem, and He does not deny it either. He shifts the entire frame from amount to presence, and the amount He names is the least anybody could have.

Which is aimed squarely at your search.

You have been looking for something with enough substance to be located. A state, findable, of a certain size, matching a definition you can state in four clean sentences. And the answer given to men who asked in exactly that register was a seed you would lose if you dropped it on a table.

And the size you have been looking for was never the size it comes in. The written word answers a request for increase with the smallest thing in the room, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been searching for something large enough to find.

And you cannot summon it and were never expected to inventory it either. The word shifts from amount to presence without ever offering a method for either, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than returning a measurement.

The suspicion about the definition

Now let me take the suspicion seriously, because you will not accept it being waved at.

A man who genuinely had it would not be able to specify it so cleanly.

That is a real claim and it deserves a real answer, and the answer is that it is not true and it is not how any other faculty works.

A man who can define courage precisely is not thereby a coward. A woman who can distinguish four kinds of grief is not disqualified from grieving. Facility with a concept and possession of the thing are independent, and they are independent in both directions: plenty of people have neither, plenty have both, and plenty have one without the other in either combination.

There is no mechanism by which understanding a thing consumes it.

What is true is that a man who is good at defining will look for the thing in the form of the definition, and a definition is a description of a category rather than a picture of an instance. Which is why the search comes back empty. Not because there is nothing there, but because you have been holding up a specification and looking for something that matches a specification, and lived instances do not match specifications; they instantiate them, which is a different relation and does not feel like recognition.

And your understanding did not consume the thing you understand. The word never once presents comprehension as a rival to possession, and the Spirit is the one who separates two things that a careful man has been running together for fifteen years.

And nothing about you is under review for being able to define it. 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 a suspicion he has never said out loud.

Where a seed would show

One practical note, and then I will leave you alone.

If it is the size of a seed, it will not be findable by inspection. Seeds are not located by looking at the soil.

They are located by what is growing, and that is an outward and slow observation rather than an inward and immediate one.

You have prayed for fifteen years while unable to locate faith in yourself. That is worth putting in a sentence and reading twice. A man with nothing does not do that; a man with a policy might do it for eighteen months. Fifteen years of praying without being able to find the thing you are praying with is, in outward terms, exactly what a seed looks like from above ground.

And you are not required to locate it in order to have it. The word says the kingdom is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and cast into his garden, and it grew, and the Spirit is the one who does the growing rather than the man who inspects the soil.