I Defend It Harder When I Feel It Less

Somebody said something loose in the class on Wednesday and you took it apart.

Not unkindly. You are never unkind. But you were thorough, and the room went quiet in the way it goes quiet when a teacher is being extremely precise, and afterwards two of them came up and said they had never had it explained like that.

And the thing you said was completely true.

And you noticed, walking to the car, that you had been louder than the sentence required.

That is not the first time. It has been happening for about eight months and you have been keeping a private note of it, and the note has a pattern in it that you do not like.

The less you can currently feel it, the harder you argue for it.

There is a version of you that would have let that comment go on Wednesday. That version is about two years back. She was warmer and slower and she did not need the room to agree with her, and you would like to know where she went.

Let me say something first.

I am not accusing you of anything.

Nothing you taught on Wednesday was false and nothing you have taught in eight months has been false. Defending true things is not a symptom, it is a teacher's job, and half that class is standing on ground you laid.

I am saying I noticed the volume was doing something other than teaching. That is all.

Whose approval is in the room

Here is Paul, right at the front of an angry letter, asking himself a question out loud.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.Galatians 1:10

Look at when he asks it. He is about to spend an entire letter arguing hard, and before he starts he stops and checks who the arguing is aimed at.

He does not conclude that arguing is wrong. The next five chapters are one long argument. What he does is separate the argument from the audience, and he does it first, before a word of the case.

That is a discipline rather than a rebuke, and it is what a teacher does when she cares about being accurate more than she cares about being right.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, in that hall with the whiteboard still covered in your handwriting.

You are held by the one you serve rather than by the room you convince. Not one day, not once you can feel the doctrine again, not when the volume comes down. Right now, with a marker still in your hand, you are the servant of Christ that verse names, and Paul asks that question about himself without concluding anything shameful. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real woman in a real room.

Now, why does the volume rise when the feeling drops?

I think you already know and have not said it out loud.

When a thing is warm in you, it does not need defending, because it is present. You can hold it up and let people look at it.

When it goes quiet, the only evidence of it left in the room is your conviction about it, and so conviction has to do the work that presence used to do. And conviction that is doing two jobs gets loud.

That is not hypocrisy. That is a woman holding a true thing steady during a season when the warmth has gone off it, and the loudness is the sound of the holding, not the sound of pretending.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You are still a servant of Christ during a season when nothing feels like anything, and the doctrine you have been defending is true whether or not it is currently warm in you. The word says the servant of Christ, which is a standing rather than a temperature, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real hall on a real evening with the cups still on the table.

You are allowed to say, out loud, to God, that you cannot feel it at the moment. That is not an admission against interest. It is just accurate.