Everybody Aged Except Her

The evening was fine. That is the part that gets forgotten.

You were glad to see them. There was a story about a road that is still funny after thirty years. Somebody's son is doing well and you were genuinely pleased about it. Somebody hugged you at the door and meant it.

And then you got in the car, and something started, and it ran the whole way home.

I have driven a great many miles on my own and I know what a road does to a mind. Whatever is unfinished comes forward the moment your hands are busy and your mouth is not, and if there is arithmetic waiting it will start at the second turn and go all the way to your own driveway.

So the room was not the problem. The room was good.

The drive is where this actually happens, and the drive is what we are going to work on, because a room full of people is much harder to change than twenty minutes on a road.

What the arithmetic is made of

Let us look at what is actually in that sum, because it is thinner than it feels.

It has faces, at a distance, in one light, over one evening. Some of those people you had not seen for four years. Two of them you saw for eleven minutes.

And out of that you built a ranking that covered eighteen people and put you somewhere in it.

You are the author of a ranking that nobody else in that room has ever once seen, and not one of those eighteen people agreed to be in it. Galatians 5 says let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, and the Holy Spirit is what dismantles a table a woman built entirely on her own.

Nobody could do that. There is not enough there. If you had to defend the ranking to somebody who was also present, you could not, and you know it, and you would not try.

You are building a ranking from an evening that has never once contained enough to support one, and eleven minutes across a room has never told anybody anything. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman how thin the material actually is, and Galatians 5 names what happens between people when comparison gets into a group.

And here is the thing the arithmetic quietly did to the evening.

You came home with a result instead of an evening.

That room had thirty years in it. There was a story about a road. There was a man whose father died in March and who did not mention it and probably wanted to. There was a woman who has been ill and looked better than she has for a year, and you noticed that at the time and then it went under the sum on the way home.

All of that was there, and the drive replaced it with a number.

You are trading a whole evening for a number every time you get in the car, and no arithmetic has ever once been worth the thirty years it displaced. Scripture in Galatians 5 says let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a woman her evening back on the road.

Provoking one another

Paul closes a chapter with a sentence that names three things in a row, and the middle one is the one people skip.

Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:26, King James Version)

Provoking one another.

That is not about anger. The word carries the sense of calling somebody out, challenging them, setting up a contest where there was not one.

And that is exactly what a comparison does, silently, without anybody in the room knowing. Nobody at that gathering issued a challenge. Nobody was competing with anybody. And on the way home, eighteen people who were being friendly got entered into a contest they never agreed to be in.

You are running a contest that nobody at that table ever entered, and not one person in that room has ever once been competing with you. It is written in Galatians 5 that we are not to be provoking one another or envying one another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who dissolves a contest a woman set up on her own.

And notice the phrase at the front of the verse, because it explains the rest.

Desirous of vain glory. Empty glory. A standing that does not correspond to anything real, and that is what a ranking of eighteen faces on a drive home actually is. It has no substance. Nobody awards it, nobody records it, and it does not exist anywhere on earth outside a car.

Paul's answer is not to come first in it. It is that the whole category is empty.

You are competing for a standing that has never once existed anywhere outside your own vehicle, and no result from it has ever been recorded by anybody. The Spirit of God is what shows a woman that a whole category is empty rather than that she is losing in it, and the written word says let us not be desirous of vain glory.

Name what they told you

So here is the assignment, and it is for the car specifically.

On the next drive home, name one thing each person told you that evening, out loud.

Out loud, in the car, on your own. It will feel foolish for about ninety seconds and then it will not.

You are allowed to feel foolish for ninety seconds, and awkwardness has never once been evidence that a thing was not worth doing. Galatians 5 says let us not be desirous of vain glory, envying one another, and the Spirit of God is what carries a woman through the first minute of saying something out loud.

He said his knee is bad and he is going to have to do something about it. She said the eldest is moving out in September. He said that road story again and it was better than last time. She said nothing much all evening and I should probably call her.

Go round everybody who spoke to you.

Here is why this works and the deciding does not. The arithmetic runs because the road is empty and something has to occupy it. You cannot leave that space blank, because it fills itself. What you can do is put something else in it, and what you put in has to be about them, because the whole error was that they stopped being people somewhere around the second turn.

You are able to fill a drive with people instead of with a sum, and a road with something in it has never once been able to run arithmetic at the same time. The written word in Galatians 5 names the setting up of contests and says do not, and the Holy Spirit is what turns twenty minutes in a car into care for other people rather than an audit of yourself.