I Think It Is Just That I Am A Warm Person

Priya said something to a girl at a bus stop last month and got home and thought: that was nothing, that is just what I am like.

She has been thinking it about everything since.

She is the person who says the encouraging thing. She always has been. In queues, at work, at the school gate, on the phone to her mother-in-law who is difficult. Something true and lifting arrives in her head about the person in front of her and she says it, and it lands, and she moves on.

People have told her, more than once, that it is a gift.

And for years she took that as a compliment about her character, which is what she assumed people meant. Then somebody used the word deliberately, in a church sense, and she went home and thought about it, and about four days later arrived at the position she has been in ever since.

Which is: no. It is temperament. Some people are warm and some people are not, and warm people say warm things, and it is no more spiritual than being tall.

She is thirty-six. And what has made this uncomfortable rather than merely tidy is that she has started to hold things back.

She catches the true thing arriving and she thinks that is only me and she does not say it, and then the moment goes. And it has happened perhaps a dozen times now, and each time she feels a small flatness afterwards that she cannot account for, and the flatness is the reason she is reading this.

You may know that flatness.

Maybe you also decided your encouragement was only your personality. Maybe the logic was airtight. And maybe you have quietly begun to hold things back since.

The four words at the end

There is an instruction near the end of a letter, and everybody reads the instruction and stops before the last four words, and the last four words are yours.

Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do.1 Thessalonians 5:11

Even as also ye do.

He is not introducing something. He is naming a thing they were already doing, before anybody told them to, apparently without noticing it was a category.

Read the verbs he uses for it: comfort and edify. Edify is a building word. It means to construct, brick by brick, the way a house goes up, which is a slow cumulative thing and not a dramatic one.

That is the whole of the description. Ordinary people, already doing it, told to keep going, in language about building rather than about revelation.

Which means what you have been dismissing as merely your character is precisely the activity the verse names, done exactly the way the verse describes it, by exactly the kind of person the verse is written to.

And you are already doing the thing the verse names. The written word ends the instruction by telling them they are doing it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who has been holding things back for a month.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word calls it edifying and comforting, which are building words, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than requiring you to feel it arrive.

Where the test you failed came from

Now the reasoning, because your argument was genuinely sound and it had one hidden premise.

It is only temperament, because it does not feel like anything.

Underneath that is an assumption you never inspected: that a thing from God would arrive with a signature on it. That there would be a difference in the feeling, a weight, a heat, something to distinguish it from what your own personality produces.

Nothing in the text promises that. Not anywhere. The people in Thessalonica were doing it and had to be told what it was, which is the exact opposite of a thing that announces itself.

And consider what your test would do if applied evenly. Your patience with your mother-in-law does not feel supernatural either. Neither does your honesty, or your kindness at four in the afternoon when you are tired. God has apparently been content, for the whole history of His dealing with people, to work through temperament rather than around it.

He made yours. It is not a competing explanation.

And warmth is the channel rather than the disproof. The word says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, without excluding the ones that arrived built into a person, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover a temperament as well as an event.

And nothing about you is under review for a month of holding back. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who stopped because she was trying to be honest.

And nobody is asking you to feel anything

Let me be plain, because you will otherwise go looking for the signature and that is a search with no end.

Nothing here says wait until you feel something. Nothing here says learn to tell the two apart, or develop a sense for which is which, because the verse gives no such instrument and I am not inventing one.

And nothing here turns any of this into a future. Not what will happen to the girl at the bus stop, not anybody's health or marriage or an outcome or a date, because that is not this and it never was, and the whole fence around this gift exists to keep it small enough to survive being wrong.

What is on offer is only that you go back to saying the true thing when it arrives, and stop running the test at the door.

And you are permitted to keep speaking without a signature on it. The word tells them plainly to carry on doing what they were already doing, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a standard you must first meet.