The Measure I Have Been Using

He can tell you within about four minutes whether a meeting was any good.

He is not being flippant when he says it. He has been doing this for a long time and his judgement is not crude, and people ask him afterwards because they know he will give them a real answer rather than a polite one.

And last month he went back through his own vocabulary, which is the sort of thing he does, and he found something that has been quietly bothering him ever since.

Every single word he uses is about interior states.

Deep. Dry. Heavy, in a good way. Thin. Something in the room. Nothing much. Went somewhere. Did not really get going.

Not one of them describes a person.

He tested it further, because he is thorough, and asked himself a question he had never once asked in twenty years: when he says a meeting was good, whose good is he reporting on?

And the answer, in every case he could reconstruct, was his own.

This does not make him selfish, and I want to say that before anybody else does. His instrument is real. He can genuinely tell when something is happening, and he is right far more often than not, and a lot of people would be better off if they had a tenth of his discernment.

The instrument is real. It is pointed at one wall.

So let me ask you.

When you say a meeting was good, what exactly are you reporting on?

Paul changes the measure and leaves the appetite alone

There is a chapter in First Corinthians that is entirely about order in a meeting, and it is the most practical thing Paul ever wrote about a room.

And in the middle of it there is a sentence that does something very precise.

So it is with you. Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church.1 Corinthians 14:12

Notice which half of that sentence he leaves entirely alone. You are eager and he does not correct you for it, and the Holy Spirit gives what He gives so that something gets built in somebody who is not you.

Look at the two halves and notice which one he leaves alone.

Since you are eager. He does not correct that. He states it as a fact about them and moves straight past it without a word of criticism, and two verses earlier and later he tells them to desire these things, plainly, twice.

The appetite is not the problem. He never says it is.

Try to excel in those that build up. That is where he intervenes, and what he intervenes in is not the wanting. It is the measure.

He hands them a different question to ask. Not what happened in the room, and not what did I experience, but what got built.

And the word he uses runs all through that chapter. Building. Edification, in the older English, which literally means putting up a structure. It is an architectural word, and you cannot apply it to a feeling, because a feeling is not a structure and nothing gets erected by it.

Hear where you stand, twenty years into a working instrument.

You are not a man with a false measure. Scripture leaves the eagerness entirely alone and changes only the question being asked, and the Spirit He poured out has not once been assessable by what a person felt in a chair.

And I want to name this precisely, because you would rather have it precise than gentle.

Your vocabulary is not a moral failing. It is a calibration.

An instrument reads what it is built to read, and yours was built, over twenty years, by a tradition that pays serious attention to interior states, which is a strength that has kept a great many things alive that would otherwise have died.

But an instrument calibrated in one dimension will report confidently on that dimension and be silent about every other one, and silence from an instrument is very easily mistaken for an absence of the thing.

The word says try to excel in what builds up, and building is a category with an outside to it.

And you are not a man with a false instrument. First Corinthians 14 leaves the eagerness entirely alone and changes only the question being asked, and the Spirit has never once been assessable by what somebody felt in a chair.