The evening had been good, which is worth saying because the ending of it has been sitting on him for a week.
Twelve of them round a long table. Candles down to stubs by the end. An argument about something genuinely unimportant that went on for forty minutes and was the best part of the night. Plates pushed back, a jug going round, somebody's teenager falling asleep against the wall and being teased about it in the morning.
They had done the exercise before the food, because somebody thought it would be a good conversation starter, and it was.
Everybody got a chart. Nine columns, scored out of a possible whatever, and the whole point of the thing is that one or two of them stand up higher than the rest and that is your answer.
His did not.
Nine columns and a flat line. Not low. That would at least have been a shape. Just even, all the way across, like a fence.
The man running it looked at it for a second and then said something warm about being well rounded, and everybody laughed, and it moved on, and that was completely fine and nobody meant anything by it.
And he has been carrying that piece of paper in his head for a week.
Because he answered every one of those questions carefully. More carefully than most people at that table, he suspects. He was not gaming it and he was not being modest. He tried to tell the truth about himself forty times in a row, and the truth about himself, put through a scoring rule, produced no shape at all.
Which he has been unable to read as anything except an absence.
What this page is not going to attempt
Let me be straight, because you will be reading this the way you read everything, which is closely and with a certain skepticism.
I am not going to interpret your flat line. Not as hidden depth, not as versatility, not as a gift that the instrument does not have a column for. Every one of those readings is a fifth column invented to rescue you, and you would see through it before the end of the sentence.
I am not going to tell you what your gift is, and there is no list at the end for you to find yourself on.
You are not an absence, and you have not been given a result that quietly says nothing was found. That is not me putting a good face on it. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to produce a peak before He would deal with him.
The verse that turns the direction around
Here is the sentence, and it comes at the end of the most famous chapter in Paul's letters, immediately after the section on gifts.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.1 Corinthians 13:12
Watch the two halves of the last clause, because they are not symmetrical and that is the whole point.
Now I know in part. That is your side, and Paul puts himself in it. Partial, obstructed, working from a poor reflection.
But then shall I know even as also I am known. And that second verb is passive and it is not in the future. I am known. Present. Already. Fully.
Paul is saying that the incompleteness is entirely on the knowing side, not on the being known side. The chart in your head is a report from the dark glass.
You are already known completely, in the present tense, while every attempt you make to know yourself is admitted in Scripture to be partial. I am not straining that. 1 Corinthians 13:12 puts in part on our side and am known on His, in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it land on a man carrying a flat chart around for a week.
And notice where Paul puts it
The placement matters and you will appreciate it.
He has just spent a chapter and a half on gifts. Lists, argument, the body, the whole apparatus. And then chapter thirteen, and then this verse, which effectively says: none of that was ever how you would find out who you are.
He does not say the gifts do not matter. He says knowledge in part shall vanish away, and the thing that remains is not a category.
Which means a flat chart is not a failure of the exercise and it is not a failure of you. It is a demonstration, in your own handwriting, of the thing Paul already said about the limits of self-knowledge.
You have not fallen short of a measurement, you have run into the edge of what measurement can do, and the word named that edge before anybody built the instrument. That is 1 Corinthians 13 in its own order, and the Spirit who inspired the placement of it is not somewhere out there waiting for a peak to appear on your chart.
What a fence is, and is not
One more thing, because I know how you will have been reading that line all week.
A flat line across nine columns is a picture of a man who answered honestly and does not have a spike in the categories the instrument thinks in. That is all the data supports. It supports nothing at all about depth or worth or presence.
But you have been reading it as a photograph of your interior, and it is not that, and it was never capable of being that.
You are not what a scoring rule was able to detect in you, and no chart has ever had the standing to report on whether there is anything there. The word says we see through a glass darkly, and the Spirit who searches all things including the deep things of God is not restricted to nine columns.
So come back to the table, and the candles down to stubs, and the argument that went on too long, and a chart with no shape on it that you have been carrying for a week.
The flat line was never the injury. It is a truthful record of forty honest answers put through a rule, and the rule is fine and the man who ran it is fine.
The injury is what you did with it in the week since. You took a report from a dark glass and read it as a photograph of whether there is anything in you, and Paul says in writing that the glass is dark and that your knowing is in part and that this is the normal condition of everyone at that table, including the ones with a peak.
The completeness is on the other side and it has been the whole time.
You are known even as fully as you will ever be known, right now, and no chart has ever reported from that side of the glass. That is 1 Corinthians 13:12 in its own careful grammar, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a written line into ground a man can stand on with a useless piece of paper in his head, and God has never worked from a scoring rule, and He was not looking for a peak.
That is not something to resolve by taking a better designed one. It is something to say out loud, once, and then to go back into the room where they are still arguing about something unimportant, sitting differently while you do it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, at the table, at the door, wherever you are standing when you finish reading. Christ is in you and you are in Him, and that knowing has been given to you rather than deduced by you, which is exactly why a man with no shape on his chart can speak like this. Scripture is the ground under it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely correct, and how any of it unfolds from here is His to decide. What is being asked of you is one sentence said out loud and one chart set down. That is small enough for tonight, and it stands on the Name and not on how convinced you feel.
- Flat line across every column, you are not a reading of my absence. Scripture says now I know in part but then shall I know even as also I am known, and the knowing that has hold of me runs from His side and it is already complete.
- Week I have spent reading a chart as a photograph of my insides, you are over. The Holy Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, and the word says we see through a glass darkly, and in the name of Jesus I am known fully and I am known now.
- Lord, You know me even as I shall know when I see face to face, and none of that waits on a peak appearing anywhere. I thank You, because the completeness was always on Your side, and tonight I am going back to the table known.
1 Corinthians 13:12
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