I Stopped Minding And Then I Minded

Marion had it settled for about fifteen years and last month it came apart in a car for six minutes.

She does not have this. She never has. She asked for a long stretch in her thirties, properly and without drama, and it did not come, and somewhere in her forties she stopped asking and made a genuine peace with it that was not resignation dressed up as anything.

She has meant that peace. Fifteen years of meaning it, including several occasions where she has said something steadying to somebody younger who was distressed about the same thing, and she meant that too.

And then last month.

Somebody she likes very much mentioned, in passing, without any weight on it at all, that she prays this way in the mornings. It was one sentence in a conversation about something else. She was not making a point and she does not know that Marion does not.

And Marion was fine, and drove home, and about four minutes into the drive something arrived in her chest that she had not felt since about 2009.

Six minutes. And then it went, and she was fine again, and she has been fine since.

But she is fifty-eight and she has spent a month unable to decide what those six minutes mean about the fifteen years. Whether the peace was real and this was a flicker, or whether the peace was a lid and she has just seen underneath it.

You may know that drive.

Maybe you also settled something years ago. Maybe somebody said one unweighted sentence. And maybe you have been reassessing a decade and a half since.

The question and the answer it expects

There is a run of questions at the end of 1 Corinthians 12 and the grammar of them is doing something that translation flattens.

Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?1 Corinthians 12:29-30

Seven questions in a row, and in the Greek they are constructed in the form that expects the answer no.

Not might some not? Not is it possible that a few do not? The construction anticipates a negative, and Paul builds seven of them in a row precisely so that nobody in that church could read the preceding list as a set of requirements.

Do all speak with tongues? No. That is the expected answer and it is Paul's answer and it is in the chapter that gives the list in the first place.

Which means the thing you do not have is a thing the text says not everybody has, in a sentence constructed to make the point unmissable, written to a church that was in danger of making exactly the ranking you have spent fifteen years quietly living underneath.

And you are not missing something that everybody was supposed to have. The written word asks seven questions in a form that expects no and puts them immediately after the list, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who had it settled and found out last month that she did not.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word puts the manifestation of the Spirit in every one of them for the profit of all, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than sorting a room by which gift arrived.

What the six minutes were

Now the month you have spent reassessing, because the two options you have been choosing between are both wrong.

The peace was real and this was a flicker. The peace was a lid.

Neither. A peace about a thing you wanted is not the absence of wanting it. It is a settled relationship with the wanting, and a settled relationship does not mean the underlying thing has been removed.

You made peace with not having it. You did not stop being a woman who once asked for something for years, and nothing about a genuine peace requires that woman to have been deleted.

Which means six minutes in a car is not evidence that fifteen years were false. It is evidence that you are still the same person who asked in her thirties, and that a sentence from somebody you like can reach her.

That is not a lid coming off. That is a real peace behaving exactly as real peace behaves, which is to say imperfectly, in a body, in a car, occasionally.

And a settled peace is not the same thing as an absence of wanting. The word says godliness with contentment is great gain, and it names contentment as something learned rather than as a state in which nothing stirs, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction usable.

And nothing about you is under review for six minutes. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has spent a month auditing fifteen years.

And nothing here says ask again

Let me be plain about what I am not doing, because a message like this can quietly become an instruction.

I am not telling you to start asking again. You asked for years and made a peace and that peace has served you and served at least one younger person who needed steadying, and there is nothing here that requires you to reopen it.

And I am not going to adjudicate anything about the practice, or about who has what, or about what a gathering should do. That is argued about by serious people and it is not settled here.

What is available is smaller than any of that. It is only that six minutes in a car does not overturn fifteen years, and you can have both without deciding which one was the real you.

And you are permitted to keep the peace and the six minutes. The word says I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content, in a sentence that admits learning and therefore admits it not being automatic, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than requiring you to have arrived.