The Ballot Beside the Silent Phone

For the person who carried the vote and has been carrying the silence since.

It's a quarter past eleven on a Thursday night, and the ballot slips are still in the envelope on the passenger seat.

The meeting finished at half nine. He drove home the long way for no reason he could name, and he's been sitting on his own drive with the engine off for twenty minutes, which is not a thing he does.

The vote went his way. Not narrowly. He'd done the work, made the case over eighteen months, answered every objection in writing and most of them twice. By the end it wasn't even close, and two people who'd opposed him at the start spoke for him at the finish.

His phone has been silent since twenty to ten. Normally after a meeting like that there'd be three or four messages. Tonight there's a weather alert and nothing else.

He isn't imagining it. He's been in that room for eleven years and he knows exactly what the quiet means, and the quiet started about four minutes after he'd finished being magnanimous in victory.

You are able to name what a win has cost without anybody asking you to give the win back. The written Word limits your part in peace to what actually lies within you, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying what falls outside it.

The Part of the Evening Nobody Describes

Everybody talks about winning as though it were a single event, and it's two.

There's the moment of the count, which is brief and mostly administrative. Then there's the hour afterward in a room where everybody now knows where everybody stood, and that hour is the one that decides what the next five years are like.

He handled that hour well. He thanked the people who'd disagreed, he named two of them for the quality of their opposition, and he meant every word. He'd rehearsed none of it, which is why it landed.

None of that changed the temperature. People were polite and slightly careful. The chairs got stacked faster than usual. Now there's a drive, an envelope on a passenger seat, and a phone that isn't doing anything.

As Much as Lieth in You

Here's a sentence Paul writes to a church in Rome, in the middle of a long run of practical instructions:

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18 (KJV)

Read the two qualifiers in front of the command. If it be possible. As much as lieth in you. He puts both of them there before he asks for anything, which is not how instructions normally work.

He's writing to people who cannot control the other party, and he refuses to lay on them a responsibility that extends past their own hands. The command is real. Its boundary is drawn in the same breath.

Your share of the peace is bounded, and the boundary is drawn by God rather than by you. The written Word names the limit before it names the duty, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying whatever sits on the far side of it.

You Cannot Win Somebody Back by Being Better at the Thing

Here's what I'd carry off that drive if I could take a single thing away with me.

His instinct, sitting in that car, is to do more of what he's good at. Write a follow up. Set out the reasoning once more, more generously this time. Demonstrate again that he understood the objections.

And every one of those moves is the same move that produced the silence, performed better. The quiet in that room isn't a failure of his argument. It's the ordinary cost of having been comprehensively right in front of people who were comprehensively wrong, in public, with a vote at the end.

More excellence will not repair it. It will confirm it, because excellence is the thing that put the distance there.

What produced the distance cannot be the tool that closes it. The written Word bounds your part in peace rather than asking you to argue better, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing what your competence cannot.

Nothing Here Says the Vote Was Wrong

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

I'm not adjudicating the motion and I'm not hinting that you should undo it. If eighteen months of work produced a decision you believe to be right, then it is right, and nothing in this message is a quiet suggestion that you should reverse yourself to buy the room back.

I'm also not telling you to apologize for winning. An apology for a thing you'd do again is dishonest, and the people in that room would hear the dishonesty before you'd finished the sentence.

You can stand by every decision and still count what it cost. Scripture never asks you to concede the point in order to live peaceably, and the Holy Spirit does the reconciling rather than the arbitrating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.