I Decided I Was Above This

His objections are good. That is what makes this hard to say, and it is why nobody has ever successfully argued him out of them.

He can tell you precisely what happens when a church runs one of these things. The way it becomes about the announcement. The particular tone of the testimony at the end, and who gives it, and how it is framed. The unspoken arithmetic about who is participating. The people for whom it becomes a competition with themselves and who nobody notices are unwell.

He is right about all of that. He has read more than most of the people organizing it, and he is not showing off when he says so, and if you sat him down he would give you a careful and generous account of why he thinks what he thinks.

He has not been to one in nine years.

And here is the sentence he has never put beside the other sentences, though it has been sitting there the whole time: he is extremely lonely.

Not for company. He has friends. Lonely in the specific way of a man who has been right, on his own, for a long time, and who has noticed that being right has not once been warm.

If you have a good critique and an empty room, come and sit down. Nobody is going to argue with your objections.

Look at what the apostles did with churches they had every reason to leave

Here is a small verse at the end of a chapter, and its whole force is in the situation surrounding it.

And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed.Acts 14:23

Now think about which churches these were.

These are the congregations from earlier in the same chapter. One of these towns had, weeks before, tried to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas as gods, and had to be physically restrained. In another one the crowd turned in an afternoon and stoned Paul and left him for dead outside the wall.

These are not sober, well-taught, admirable communities. They are new, volatile, badly informed, and comprehensively unimpressive, and Paul had more evidence than any modern critic has ever had that group religion goes wrong.

And what he does is go back to them, appoint people, pray with them, and commend them to the Lord.

He does not write them off. He does not stand at a distance being accurate about them. He goes back into the room, and the record is careful to say that he prayed with them, which is a thing you cannot do at a distance.

You are looking at somebody who had a better case than yours and stayed anyway, and it was already the harder and the wiser thing. Acts 14:23 is where that sits, at the end of a chapter that includes a stoning, and the same Spirit who moved Luke to put those two facts in one chapter is the one who reaches a man who has been right and alone for nine years.

What being above a thing actually costs

Now let me say the expensive part, and I am going to say it without withdrawing a single one of his objections, because they are sound.

There is a position available to an intelligent person which is: standing slightly outside a thing, seeing it clearly, and declining to participate. It is genuinely comfortable. It cannot be embarrassed. Nothing can go wrong in it, because nothing is happening in it.

And it has one property that nobody mentions when they take it up, which is that it is a room for one person and no other person can be in it with you.

That is the whole of the loneliness. Not lack of company. He has company. It is that the place he has been standing for nine years has no room in it for anybody else, because being above a thing is a solitary position by construction.

And here is the further cost, which is the one he will feel most. Every objection he has is correct, and not one of them has ever improved anything, because a criticism made from outside a room has no way into it.

You have something that room actually needs, and it has been unavailable to them for nine years. He promised it, in the description of a body where the eye cannot say to the hand that it has no need of it (1 Corinthians 12:21), and His Spirit does not equip a man with sight in order for him to use it somewhere else.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it, and it is one of his objections and he is right about it.

Some people must not go without food, and religious language around food is genuinely dangerous for some of the people in that room. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site admires anybody for how long or how hard, ranks the person who participates above the person who does not, or makes the corporate version the superior kind. Those were his objections. They are correct, and they are house rules here.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are not being asked to abandon one of your objections, and you never were. It is written into 1 Thessalonians 5:21, where the instruction is to prove all things and hold fast what is good, and the Holy Spirit is not asking a discerning man to stop discerning.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.