I Can Argue Myself Out Of Anything

The thought came at about six and by half past nine she had dismantled it completely.

The thought was: write to him.

A man she used to work with, seven or eight years ago, who she got on with in the ordinary way you get on with people at work and has not seen since he left.

And what she did with that, over three and a half hours, was superb.

She started with the obvious one: he will think it is strange. Then she went further, because she is better than that: it is not strange, but it might land at a bad moment, and she would have no way of knowing. Then she took the other side seriously for a while, which she always does, and considered that a message out of nowhere is often a kindness. Then she found the flaw in that, which is that she would be doing it partly to relieve her own sense of having thought about him.

By nine she had got as far as the real question, which is whether an unsolicited message is ever fully for the other person.

By half past nine she had decided not to.

And she sat in the window seat with the lamp on feeling the particular satisfaction of having thought about something properly, which is a real pleasure and she is not going to pretend otherwise.

And then, at about ten, doing something else entirely, she had a thought she did not enjoy.

She has done that maybe forty times. And she has never once, in her whole life, spent three and a half hours carefully constructing the case for doing something and arrived at yes.

The machinery only runs in one direction.

And that is you in your own chair with the lamp on, or you would have gone to bed.

What guiding actually looks like, and where thinking sits in it

Let me start with a sentence about how He works, because it is not what people assume.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.John 16:13

Guide. Not overrule. Not announce. Not bypass.

A guide walks with somebody who is walking. A guide does not carry you and does not shout instructions from a distance, and a guided person is still doing the walking, still using their legs, still looking where they are going.

Which means your thinking is not the opposite of being led. It is the legs.

You are not being asked to stop thinking, and the thinking is where the guiding happens. It is written that when the Spirit of truth comes He will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13), and guide is a word that assumes somebody in motion. The Holy Spirit is not looking for a woman who switches her mind off in a window seat.

So this is not going to be a page that tells you to trust your gut. Your gut is not more reliable than your head and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The problem is not that you think. It is that only one counsel ever gets to speak.

Look at what happened between six and half past nine. Every single argument you made was an argument against. Even the moment when you took the other side seriously was in service of finding its flaw, which you did, brilliantly, because you are good at this.

You are running a court in which nobody has ever been appointed for the other side. It is written that the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice (Proverbs 12:15), and a mind that only ever hears one counsel is not hearing advice, it is hearing itself. The Holy Spirit is not the voice you have been out-arguing, and there is no evidence He has been in that room at all.

Now here is what I think has happened, and I offer it as a possibility rather than a diagnosis, because I do not know your life.

Somewhere you learned that being careful is the same as being good. And it very often is. But careful has a direction on it, and yours points at doing nothing, and doing nothing has been dressed up in the clothes of wisdom for a long time.

You are allowed to do something without having first proved that doing it is beyond criticism. It is written that whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus (Colossians 3:17), and there is no clause requiring the action to survive three and a half hours of cross examination. The Holy Spirit does not conduct His guidance as a trial in which the defense never speaks.

And one more, which is the plainest thing here.

You got as far as the real question: whether an unsolicited message is ever fully for the other person.

It is a good question. It is also unanswerable, which is why it made such an effective stopping point. And no human kindness anywhere has ever passed that test, including every kind thing anybody has ever done for you.