Two Rows In Front

She could not tell you the woman's surname and she has been measuring by her for two years.

Third seat in, two rows in front, most weeks. She arrives with her Bible already out. Her handwriting in it is small and neat and there is a lot of it. She prays out loud in the meeting sometimes and it is not performance, you can tell it is not, and she says things that make people go quiet.

Her children are visibly good and clearly like her.

She has been through something, everybody knows it vaguely, and she does not talk about it, and she is not brittle about it either, which is somehow the most impressive part.

And every single Sunday, without deciding to, the woman two rows behind her takes a reading.

It is not envy. She would help that woman move house tomorrow. It is not dislike, and she would be devastated if anybody suggested it was.

It is that she has, over two years, quietly installed another human being as the unit of measurement for her own walk with God, and every week she comes out about forty percent short, and she has never once said this out loud to anybody, and it happens before the second song.

Paul calls it unwise, not sinful

There is a line in the second Corinthian letter where Paul is defending himself against people who go in for exactly this, and what he says about it is not a moral rebuke, which is what most people expect.

But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.2 Corinthians 10:12

Take that in your seat. You are not on a scale with anybody's name beside yours. The word says they measuring themselves by themselves are not wise, and it is the Holy Spirit who sets the pace in two women on two different roads.

Are not wise.

That is instrument language. It is what you say about somebody using the wrong tool: not that they are wicked, that they are going to get a wrong number, and then make decisions based on it.

And think about why the instrument is broken. You are measuring your inside against her outside. You have her Sunday morning and eleven feet of distance. You do not have her Tuesday, her marriage, her three in the morning, what she is like when she is tired, or the sentence she said to somebody in a car park in March that she has not stopped thinking about.

Nobody has ever compared like with like in the history of a church building.

So take this in your seat, and know it is not my defense of you, it is what is written: you are not being weighed against her by God, right now, and there has never been a scale with two names on it. His word says comparing yourselves among yourselves is not wise, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing, in two women, at two speeds, toward one image.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on, and who built a room for it, and the design of that room is the argument.

Six people. Once a week. Each one asked the same question out loud: how does it stand with you.

Each one. Not: who is doing best. Not: how are you compared to the others. The question was about your own week, and the answers went round, and the mechanism made comparison structurally impossible, because everybody heard everybody else's Tuesday.

That is the piece your Sunday morning is missing. You have her Sunday face and nothing else, and eleven feet of air, and two years of arithmetic done in the dark.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method put people close enough that nobody had to guess.