The Corrected Sentence and the Empty Desk

For the person whose correction was accurate and whose colleague has gone.

Being right makes a person bigger and lighter at the same time, and nobody warns you about the second half.

Bigger is obvious. You settle a question, the room adjusts, and something in your standing rises by a small measurable amount. That's real and it isn't sinful and you'd be strange not to feel it.

Lighter is the part that catches people out. Inflation makes a thing larger by putting more air in it, and air weighs nothing, and a body full of air doesn't hold anybody down or hold anybody up. You can be visibly larger in a room and carrying less than you were a month ago.

She thinks about this every time she passes the desk by the window, which she does eleven times a day.

The desk is empty. It has been since June, and the person who sat at it left for reasons that were given in a leaving card as being about commuting distance.

The sentence she corrected was on page four of a report, and she was right about it. It was a real error, it mattered, and if it had gone out uncorrected it would have cost the department something. She marked it in front of two other people, kindly, and everybody agreed and moved on.

You are able to be exactly right and to notice what it emptied, both in the same breath. The written Word says knowledge puffs a person up while love builds them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can do the building.

The Small Rise and the Slow Cooling

Nothing dramatic happened, and that's what makes it so hard to talk about.

There was no argument. Nobody raised a voice. She was, by every account including his, generous about it. He said thank you, made the change, and bought her a coffee two days later.

What changed was the temperature of every draft after it. He started running his work past somebody else first, then stopped asking her opinion on the open questions and sent her only the finished ones. By about March she was receiving his reports rather than building them with him.

You know that cooling. It isn't hostility and there's nothing to complain about anywhere in it. It's what happens when you demonstrate, accurately and in company, that you are the person who finds the error.

Puffed Up, or Built

Here's Paul, writing to a church that had a great deal of knowledge and no ability to sit down together:

We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.1 Corinthians 8:1 (KJV)

Charity is the old word for love. Edify is the old word for building, in the plain sense of putting something up that stands.

Notice that he doesn't say the knowledge is wrong. He grants it in the same sentence, quite deliberately: we all have knowledge. He isn't recommending ignorance and he never does anywhere.

What he says is that knowledge and love do two different jobs to a person. One inflates. The other builds. He puts them in the same line so you can see they were never the same operation.

What you know inflates, and only love puts something up that stands. The written Word grants the knowledge in the same breath as it names the limit, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the building in you.

Inflation Is Real Size and No Weight

Here's what I'd carry out of that office if I could take a single thing away with me.

An inflated thing is genuinely larger. That's not an illusion and it's not a criticism. A balloon at full size takes up real space in a real room, and anybody would tell you it's bigger than it was.

It also cannot bear a load. Put a shelf on it and see. Size and strength came apart at the moment air replaced substance, and from the outside the two look identical until somebody leans on you.

That's the whole of what happened at that desk. She got larger in the department and less load bearing to one person, at the same instant, from the same accurate sentence, and neither of those was visible on the day.

Inflation is real size and no weight, which is why nobody can lean on it. The written Word separates the inflating from the building in one line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives weight back to a person who has been full of air.

Nothing Here Says the Correction Was Wrong

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

I'm not adjudicating page four. If the error was an error, it was, and the department was better for its being caught. Nothing in this message hints that you should have let something wrong go out under somebody's name.

I'm also not telling you to apologize for competence. An apology for doing your job accurately would be dishonest, and he'd hear the dishonesty before you finished.

You can keep the correction and still see the empty desk for what it is. Scripture grants the knowledge in the same sentence that names its limit, and the Holy Spirit does the rebuilding rather than the arbitrating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Zariah This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.