There Was Never One Scale

I want to ask a question that sounds pedantic and is not.

Where is the scale?

Not metaphorically. Actually. When you weigh your face against another woman's and a result comes out, where does that weighing happen, and what instrument performs it?

There is no answer. There is no scale. There has never been an object, a standard, a unit, or a scoring system anywhere in the world that both of those faces were placed on.

What there is, is a feeling that arrives fast and carries the shape of a result, and the shape of a result is convincing enough that nobody ever asks where the instrument is.

That is worth sitting with for a while, because a great deal has been built on it. Years of afternoons. Whole evenings. A running position in a ranking that has no registrar and no scoreboard and no location.

What a comparison actually needs

Consider what it would take for the comparison to be a real one.

You would need a single dimension that both faces could be measured along. Not several. One, because if there are several, then a face that is ahead on one and behind on another cannot produce a single result, and a single result is exactly what you keep getting.

You would need a unit. Something you could count.

And you would need a fixed reference, so that today's reading could be compared with last month's and both would mean the same thing.

None of the three exists. Not one. And yet a result arrives every time, in about two seconds, with total confidence.

You are receiving results from an instrument that has never once existed, and no unit, dimension or reference has ever been available for the reading. The Holy Spirit is what asks a woman the question nobody has asked her, and 1 Corinthians 12 says what God actually did with the members of a body.

And I want to name what the feeling actually is, because it is not measurement and it is not nothing.

It is a mood with a shape. Something arrives, and the mind, which cannot tolerate a thing with no explanation, immediately supplies one, and the explanation it supplies is a comparison, because a comparison is the readiest story available to a woman in a room with other women.

So the feeling comes first and the ranking is the explanation attached to it afterward. Which means the ranking is not the source of anything. It is a caption.

You are looking at a caption rather than a finding, and it has never once been the thing that produced the feeling. Scripture in 1 Corinthians 12 says God set the members every one in the body as it pleased Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a caption off a woman's afternoon.

Set every one as it pleased him

Paul is talking about a body and he says something about arrangement that closes this whole subject.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. (1 Corinthians 12:18, King James Version)

Set. Placed. It is a word about position rather than about value.

Every one of them. Not the important ones. Every single one, individually placed, and the placing is the act being described.

And then the phrase that settles it. As it hath pleased him.

Not according to a ranking. Not by merit, not by a competition, not by a scale of any kind. According to what pleased Him, which is a reason that admits of no comparison at all, because there is no measure by which one preference of God is more than another.

You are set in place by a preference rather than sorted by a score, and there has never once been a scale involved in the placing of anybody. It is written in 1 Corinthians 12 that God set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman she was placed rather than ranked.

And there is one more thing in that verse worth having.

A placement cannot be compared with another placement, because the whole meaning of a place is where it is. A thing in the right place is not more or less than a thing in a different right place. Those are not two points on a line. They are two locations.

Which is precisely why the scale does not exist. It is not that nobody has built it. It is that there is nothing for it to measure, because the arrangement was never a ranking in the first place.

You are in a location rather than at a position on a line, and two places have never once been the kind of thing that can be weighed against each other. The Spirit of God is what turns a ranking into an arrangement in a woman's own understanding, and the written word says as it hath pleased him.

Name your own placement

So here is the assignment, and it is about location rather than about faces.

Name out loud one thing that was placed with you and nobody else in your life does.

Not a thing done better than anybody. That is a ranking again, wearing a nicer coat. A thing that was placed here, and that would not happen at all with somebody else standing in this spot.

You are placed somewhere on purpose rather than positioned somewhere on a list, and no preference of God has ever once been more or less than another one. 1 Corinthians 12 says He set the members every one of them as it hath pleased Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a woman a location instead of a rank.

I am the one who rings my aunt. Nobody else in this family would notice that she had gone quiet. I am the one the girls at work tell things to. I am the person who keeps that group together and it would stop within a year without me.

Say it out loud, once, in your own kitchen.

Here is why it works. A placement is not comparable, and once you have said one out loud, the comparison has nowhere to stand, because you have just described something that is not on any line at all.

You are able to name a place rather than a position, and a place has never once been able to be entered into a comparison. The written word in 1 Corinthians 12 sets every member individually and by preference, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one spoken sentence into care rather than into self assertion.