Enough to Know How Much I Have Not Read

There is a shelf, and on the shelf there are forty-one books, and thirty-four of them have been started.

Fen is twenty-nine. She began reading properly at twenty-two, because somebody said something in a conversation she could not answer and she went home and could not sleep, and by the following spring she had ordered nine things.

It went well for about four years. She loved it. She still does.

The trouble came in slowly, and it looks like this: she used to say what she thought, and now she almost never does, and the reason is not shyness.

The reason is that she now knows, for any given thing she might say, roughly where the argument goes next. She knows the four positions. She knows which two of them are held by people she respects, and she knows the strongest objection to her own, and she knows that she has not read the thing she would need to read to answer it.

So she says nothing, because saying something feels like claiming ground she has not surveyed.

She calls it honesty. Her friend Rachael, who is blunt, called it something else in June, in a kitchen, and Fen has been quietly furious about it since and has not been able to argue with it.

What Rachael said was: you have read yourself into a corner and you are calling the corner integrity.

And the part Fen has not said to anybody, including Rachael, is that at twenty-two, before any of the forty-one books, she said one thing to a woman in a car who was in the worst week of her life, and it was four words long, and that woman still brings it up.

She could not say those four words today.

Not because she has decided they are false. She has not. She could just now give you three qualifications she would want to attach, and the qualifications are all fair, and by the time she attached them the woman in the car would have been given nothing.

And you may have that shelf. And you may have noticed that the more you gather, the less you hand anybody.

Paul says exactly what knowledge does on its own

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it for years and it was never yours.

You are not disqualified by what you have not read. You never were. Scripture states in one sentence what knowledge does on its own and what love does instead, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a completed reading list, who builds anybody up. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has thirty-four bookmarks in it.

Now hear it, and notice that it is a man with a great deal of learning writing it.

Knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know.1 Corinthians 8:1-2

Knowledge puffs up while love builds up.

That is not an attack on learning. Paul had more of it than anybody in the room he was writing to, and he uses it constantly, and he is using it in that very sentence.

It is a statement about what each one does by itself. Knowledge inflates. Love constructs. And the second half turns and touches the one thing you have been most careful about: he says the person who thinks they have arrived has not, which means the awareness of not having arrived is not a disqualification but a sign of health.

You are held by love and not by coverage. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who builds a person up, and He has never once waited for a shelf to be finished.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says stop reading. Do not stop. Those seven years were not a mistake and the forty-one books are not vanity, and God gives study to people on purpose and uses it in rooms every week.

And nothing here says qualifications are cowardice. Some of them are precision and precision is a form of love, and Scripture is exact about things and being exact has kept people out of real error.

The point is narrower and Rachael put her finger on it in a kitchen. There is a difference between a qualification that serves the hearer and a qualification that protects the speaker, and Scripture says love builds up, and His Spirit is the one who tells the two apart in the moment.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The four words in the car were not underdeveloped.

They were what you had, handed whole, to somebody who needed something to hold. His Spirit was in that car and He is the one who made those four words land, and He has never once revised them downward since.