After the Last Reply

For the person who ended the argument and has been living in the quiet ever since.

The thread is still on her phone, and the last message in it is hers.

Forty one messages over nine days. Hers is number forty one, and it is, by any standard she can apply to it, the best thing she wrote in the whole exchange. Measured, fair, specific about the point, generous about the other person's motives. She read it four times before she sent it.

That was in March. It is now September, and message forty one is still the bottom of that thread, and the little space underneath it has been empty for six months.

She's opened it perhaps thirty times since. Not to reread the argument. To look at the space.

What she cannot work out is how she can have been so plainly right and end up feeling like this. Everything she said holds. She'd say it all again. There is no sentence in forty one she'd take back, and there is also no cousin at Christmas.

You are able to grieve what winning cost you without being asked to take back a word of it. The written Word says a person may hold every gift, all knowledge, all faith, and still be nothing without love. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that honesty bearable in you rather than crushing.

What the Empty Space Underneath Is For

Here's what makes this hard to name out loud.

Nobody's angry with her. There was no falling out in the dramatic sense, no shouting, and nothing anybody could point to. The other person simply stopped replying, which is not a hostile act and is almost impossible to complain about.

So there's nothing to apologize for and nothing to forgive, and therefore nothing to do. A quarrel you could fix would be a relief. What she has instead is a correct position and an empty space, and no procedure for turning one into the other.

You know that space. It isn't guilt, because you haven't done anything wrong. It's the particular loneliness of a person who won cleanly and has nobody to tell about it.

Everything, and Nothing

Here's Paul in the middle of a letter to a church that had arguments running in every direction:

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.1 Corinthians 13:2 (KJV)

Charity there is the old word for love, and he's using it in the plainest sense of caring about a person rather than a point.

Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say the prophecy was wrong, or that the knowledge was faulty, or that the faith was fake. He grants every one of them. The mountain really does move.

What he says is that the man holding all of it can still be nothing, and he puts those two facts in one sentence without letting either cancel the other.

You can be right about the thing and still be paying for it, and both are true at once. The written Word holds the knowledge and the emptiness together in a single line, and the Holy Spirit makes that a description rather than an accusation.

Winning an Argument Ends a Conversation

Here's what I'd carry out of that thread if I could take a single thing away with me.

An argument and a conversation look identical from the inside and they have opposite goals. A conversation is trying to continue. An argument is trying to conclude, and the better you are at arguing, the faster you get what an argument is for.

Message forty one was excellent, and what excellent means in an argument is final. She wrote a sentence nobody could reasonably reply to, which is precisely what she was aiming at, and she has been looking at the result for six months.

That's not a moral failure. It's what happens when a person applies real skill to the wrong instrument. She wanted her cousin. She built a conclusion.

An argument wants to conclude, and a conversation only ever wanted to continue. The written Word sets all knowledge beside love without calling the knowledge false, so the skill that ended one ended the other. The Holy Spirit keeps you caring about a person you happen to be right about.

Nothing Here Says You Were Wrong

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do you real harm and I won't write it.

I'm not going to adjudicate March. I don't know what it was about and it isn't my business, and nothing in this message is a hint that you should concede a point you believe to be true. If you were right, you were right, and I'm not quietly suggesting otherwise.

I'm also not telling you to apologize for something you don't think you did. That would be dishonest, and dishonesty is a poor foundation for anything you'd want to rebuild.

You can hold your position entirely and still name what it has cost you. Scripture keeps the being right and the being lonely in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit does the holding rather than the arbitrating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.