Made This Way Or Badly Socialized

Ari has two explanations for himself and he has never been able to choose, and the choosing matters more than anything else in his life.

Explanation one: he was made like this. There is something in him that reaches for the subject the way water finds a slope, and it has been there since he was young, and it is not a decision he takes each time.

Explanation two: he is not very good at reading people, and he has dressed a deficit up in theological clothes.

Both explanations fit the evidence perfectly. That is the trouble. Every single thing about his life is equally well explained by either, and he has been running the comparison for about twenty years without ever getting a result.

And the reason it matters so much is not vanity.

If it is the first, then the discomfort he causes is a cost worth paying, and the right response to it is to keep going carefully.

If it is the second, then the discomfort is damage he is doing to people out of a defect he could have worked on, and the right response is to stop and get help.

Those are opposite responses. And he cannot tell which he owes the people in his life, and so he has spent two decades doing a nervous half version of both.

He is precise about things. He has tried to settle it properly. He has looked for evidence that would separate them and there is none, because a person who reads rooms badly and a person made to speak into rooms will produce identical data over a lifetime.

You have your own version. There is a thing you do, and you have two accounts of it, and one is a design and one is a defect, and you have never been able to close the question.

Nobody here is going to flatter you and say it is obviously the first. That would be cheap and you would not believe it anyway.

But there is a psalm that locates the answer somewhere other than in your self-assessment, and that is worth more than a verdict.

The praise is about the making, and the knowing belongs to Him

There is a verse everybody quotes as self-esteem and which is doing something quite different.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.Psalm 139:14

Look at where the confidence sits. Marvelous are thy works. The praise is directed at the maker and at the quality of His work, and the I am clause is a consequence of that rather than a claim about himself.

And read the psalm around it. It is not a psalm about a man being pleased with himself. It opens with God searching him and knowing his downsitting and his uprising, and it ends with him asking God to search him again and see if there be any wicked way in him.

That is the whole shape of it: a man who does not trust his own assessment, twice handing the assessing to somebody with better access.

Which is exactly Ari's position, and it means the psalm is not offering him a verdict. It is offering him a different assessor.

And the settling was never yours to do. That is not my evasion: the written word opens and closes that psalm with God doing the searching rather than the man, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody who has been running a comparison for twenty years.

And you are fearfully and wonderfully made, whichever way the rest of it falls. The word puts that clause before any accounting of a man's ways and not after it, and the Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a person who has not yet resolved anything about themselves.

Why the question cannot be settled from the inside

Here is the part that will either annoy you or free you and it may do both.

The two explanations are not distinguishable by introspection, and no amount of thinking will separate them, because they predict identical evidence.

That is not a failure of your self-knowledge. It is a limit of the instrument. You cannot use a mind to audit the mind it is running on, and a precise person will find that intolerable and will keep trying, which is what twenty years looks like.

There is a way out and it is not a better analysis. It is other people, over time, and God, who has access neither you nor they have.

Which is why the psalm ends where it does. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. That is a man handing over the audit he cannot run, and asking not merely for a finding but for leading afterwards.

And you are permitted to ask rather than to conclude. The word ends that psalm in the imperative, asking God to search, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real handover rather than a pious way of dropping the subject.

And He is not withholding the answer to punish your uncertainty. The word says the meek He will guide in judgment and teach His way, and the guiding is His verb and the timing is His, and the Spirit is the one who lets a precise man live inside an open question without treating it as a failure.

What is actually available tonight

Two things, and neither is a verdict.

The first is that you can stop running the comparison. Not because it is resolved. Because it cannot be resolved by the method you have been using, and twenty years is enough evidence about the method.

The second is smaller and more useful. If explanation two has any truth in it, the remedy is not to stop speaking. It is to ask one person you trust a direct question and be quiet while they answer.

That is not for tonight. But it is worth knowing that there is a route which is not more introspection, and that it does not require you to have settled anything first.

And nothing about your standing is waiting on the outcome. The word says there is now no condemnation for them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are His, which is settled whichever way the other question falls.