Looking For The Next One

Tariq was right about a man three years ago and it has cost him more than being wrong would have.

The situation was real. Something had been going on in a part of their community for a while, and Tariq had known, without being able to say how, that one particular man was at the center of it. He said nothing for a long time. When it eventually came out he had been correct in almost every particular.

Two people found out afterwards that he had known, and both said something admiring, and he was gracious about it, and he went home feeling something he did not examine.

That was three years ago. And here is what he has been doing since, which he only put words to about six weeks back.

He has been looking.

Not consciously, at first. But he has started reading rooms in a way he did not use to. He notices things about people now, and the noticing has a direction to it, and when he meets somebody new some part of him is running an assessment before the conversation is four minutes old.

He would never say any of it out loud. That is not what has gone wrong. What has gone wrong is quieter: a man who used to be at ease with people is now, permanently and slightly, on duty.

His wife said something about eight weeks ago, half joking, about him having gone quiet at things. She was not accusing him of anything. She meant he did not seem to enjoy people the way he had.

He is forty-nine.

You may know that shift.

Maybe you were right once too. Maybe it was admired. And maybe you have noticed that meeting somebody new is not what it used to be.

The instruction is about timing

There is a sentence of Paul's about judging, and the striking thing is that it does not say never. It says when.

Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts.1 Corinthians 4:5

Before the time.

He is not forbidding perception, and he is not saying nothing is ever brought to light. He says the opposite: hidden things will be brought to light, and the counsels of hearts will be made manifest. That is a promise that the seeing gets done.

What he fixes is who does it and when. And the answer to both is not you and not yet.

Which reframes the last three years. You have not been doing something forbidden. You have been doing something early, and doing early what somebody else will do properly is exhausting in a very particular way, because there is no completion available to you. You cannot finish an assessment. There is no verdict you are permitted to reach, so the assessments simply accumulate.

And the bringing to light is somebody else's work and it is promised. The written word says He will bring to light the hidden things and make manifest the counsels, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been quietly on duty for three years.

And you are not required to be the one who finds it. The word fixes the time and the agent and neither of them is you, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than assigning you a watch.

What the being right actually did

Let me name the mechanism, because I think you have felt it and not been able to describe it.

Being right was not the problem. Being thanked for being right was.

Two people said something admiring, and something in you that had never particularly wanted to be admired for that suddenly had a category for it. And a category, once opened, wants filling.

That is not vanity and it is not a moral collapse. It is what happens when an involuntary faculty gets a reward attached to it. Almost anything does this. A man who is praised for having a good ear starts listening differently.

The cost is that you have lost being off duty, which is a real loss and which your wife noticed before you did.

And you are permitted to be off duty with people. The word says be not righteous over much, neither make thyself over wise, why shouldest thou destroy thyself, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a warning against caring.

And nothing about you is under review for enjoying being right. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who went home three years ago feeling something he chose not to examine.

The gift does not need you scanning

One more thing, and it is the operational half.

The thing that happened three years ago did not happen because you were looking. That is the part worth holding on to. You were not scanning that man. It arrived, over time, without being sought, in somebody who was at ease in a room.

Which means the scanning is not an intensified version of the gift. It is a different activity, added by you, that has been running alongside it for three years and producing nothing.

Nothing has come from the looking. Check that. Three years of assessments and not one of them has been the next one.

And what you see is given rather than found. The word says the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God, and puts the searching in Him, and the Spirit is the one who shows a man something without requiring him to have been hunting.