She Is My Age And I Did The Math

It happens in about two seconds and nobody watching would ever know.

Somebody mentions when she left school, or her oldest is the same age as your oldest, or she says a year out loud in passing. And a small piece of arithmetic runs, entirely automatically, and produces a number.

And then the number gets applied to a face, and there is a verdict, and you carry it to the car.

I want to look at that calculation, because it presents itself as information and it is not information.

Here is the first thing to notice. It only ever runs one way.

It runs when the other woman looks, to your eye, better. It does not run when she does not. Nobody stands at a school gate doing arithmetic that comes out in their own favor and then feels something about it for the rest of the afternoon.

Which means the sum is not being computed to find something out. The answer is already known before the calculation starts, and the arithmetic is there to make it feel like a finding rather than a feeling.

That is not a small distinction. A feeling can be sat with. A finding demands to be acted on, and this one has been acting on you for years.

What the sum leaves out

Now let us look at what the calculation actually has in it, because it is doing something impressive with almost no data.

It has one number. Her age.

And it has one image. Her face, on that day, in that light, in whatever she was wearing, at whatever point in her week she happened to be.

From those two pieces the sum produces a conclusion about you, which is a remarkable amount of work for two inputs.

What is not in it: what her week has been. What she has slept. What she has been through in the last ten years, which you almost certainly do not know. What she thinks about her own face, which is a question nobody at that gate has ever asked her, and which would very likely surprise you.

You are running a conclusion off two numbers and no information at all, and that sum has never once had enough in it to produce anything. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what is actually inside an arithmetic she has trusted for years, and 2 Corinthians 10 has a word for measuring people against each other.

And here is what the arithmetic does to the woman herself, which is worth saying.

She stops being a person. For those two seconds she is a data point, and she has been converted into one without ever knowing it, by somebody who probably likes her.

That is not a moral scolding. It is a description of what comparison costs, and the cost lands on both of you. She loses being a person and you lose an afternoon.

You are turning somebody into a measurement, and no woman at a school gate has ever once been that. Scripture in 2 Corinthians 10 says comparing themselves among themselves, they are not wise, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a woman a person back instead of a number.

Comparing themselves among themselves

Paul says something about this that is short and unusually blunt.

But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. (2 Corinthians 10:12, King James Version)

He does not say it is wrong. He does not say it is a sin. He says it is not wise, which is a different and more useful category.

Not wise means it does not work. It means the operation is faulty, that the answers it produces are unreliable, and that a sensible person would stop doing it on those grounds alone.

That is a considerable relief if you have been carrying this as a character flaw.

You are running a faulty operation rather than committing a moral failure, and that arithmetic has never once been accurate enough to convict anybody of anything. It is written in 2 Corinthians 10 that comparing themselves among themselves, they are not wise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman out of a calculation without any condemnation in it.

And notice the phrase in the middle. Measuring themselves by themselves.

The instrument is another person. That is what makes it unreliable, because another person is not a fixed unit. She varies by the day, by the light, by her week, by what you happen to know about her, which is very little.

Measuring anything against a moving object gives a moving answer, and a moving answer is not an answer at all.

You are measuring with an instrument that changes every time you use it, and no reading it has ever given has once been repeatable. The Spirit of God is what shows a woman why the same face can produce three different verdicts in a month, and the written word says they are not wise.

One silent sentence instead

So here is the assignment, and it is a substitution rather than a prohibition.

When the arithmetic starts this week, say one silent sentence about the other woman instead.

Not about yourself. About her. In your head, one sentence, that treats her as a person rather than as a number.

She has been through something this year. I hope her mother is doing better. She looks tired and nobody has asked her. She was kind to my daughter once and I never said.

You are able to see a whole woman where a comparison only ever saw a score, and she has never once been the two facts you were measuring. 2 Corinthians 10 says they measuring themselves by themselves are not wise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman back somebody's actual face.

A calculation cannot be stopped by deciding to stop it, because it moves faster than any decision. What can be done is to put something into the two seconds afterward, and the something has to be about her, because the whole error was that she stopped being a person.

And you will notice something the first time you do it. The verdict does not survive it. It cannot run at the same time as a real sentence about a real woman, and the two seconds get used by something else.

You are able to put a person back where a number was, and the two things have never once been able to occupy the same two seconds. The written word in 2 Corinthians 10 calls the comparing unwise rather than wicked, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one silent sentence into care rather than into discipline.