I Defended It at Work

It was a Wednesday and it was about the kettle, more or less.

Cherelle was waiting for it to boil and Simone from finance was waiting behind her, and Simone said, in the entirely ordinary way people say things at a kettle: is yours the one on the corner or the one further down? My mum used to live round there. I never worked out the difference.

She was making conversation. Cherelle has known her four years. There was nothing in it at all.

And Cherelle heard herself go for about four minutes.

Not loudly. She is not a loud person and nothing about it looked strange from outside, and Simone nodded pleasantly the whole way through and then said something about her mum's garden and took her tea back to her desk.

But Cherelle knows what she did.

She gave the position. The historical background, the reason it was necessary at the time, the bit about what the other one had drifted into, the bit where she says and of course they are lovely people which she has said so many times it comes out as one word.

Four minutes. At a kettle. To a woman who asked which building it was.

She is forty-two and she has been replaying it since March.

And the thing she has arrived at, which she has not said to her husband because she cannot work out how to start it, is this: nobody was attacking me. I was answering an accusation that Simone did not make.

Which means she has been carrying the accusation herself.

Somewhere in her, ready to go, fully formed, for years, with the phrases worn smooth from use, and the only thing required to bring it out was a woman at a kettle asking a completely neutral question about a road.

And you may have done that. At work, or at a wedding, or with a taxi driver. And you may have heard yourself doing it and not been able to stop.

Paul says test your own work, and names the comparison as the trouble

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it a long time and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not on trial. You never were, and there is no case open against you anywhere in that building or in this one. Scripture gives an instruction about where a person's attention belongs and it explicitly rules out the comparison, and it is the Holy Spirit, not four minutes of position, who gives anybody peace about their own ground. Set it down here in this doorway. It is heavy and you have had it loaded and ready for years.

Now hear it, and hear the second half.

Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else.Galatians 6:4

Without comparing themselves to someone else.

That is named as the thing to be free of, and it is named at the end so it lands last. The testing is of your own work, and the payoff is a settledness that does not need anybody else to be worse.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say the comparison is inaccurate. He does not argue about who is actually further along. He simply removes the whole apparatus from the process and puts your attention on your own ground.

You are allowed to stop running the comparison. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who settles a person on their own ground, and He has never once needed the other one to come off worse first.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says you should be ashamed of your church. You should not. There is real work going on in that building and you are part of it, and people are fed and visited and buried well. Scripture is glad of every bit of that and His Spirit is the one doing it.

And nothing here says the four minutes were a lie. They were not. Every fact in them is checkable and you did not exaggerate anything, and the bit about them being lovely people is not a formula, you mean it.

The point is only about who you were answering, and Scripture tells you to test your own work rather than run the comparison, and His Spirit is the one who takes the case off the table.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You have been holding the prosecution yourself.

Nobody handed it to you and nobody in either building is running it. You built it over years so that it would be ready, and it was ready, and a kettle set it off. His Spirit knows exactly how tiring that is and He has never once been the one prosecuting.