The Cost of Being Right

For the person who would like to know what the win is actually costing per month.

What has being right cost you this year, in people?

Not in principle. In people. Names, faces, the specific ones you'd have to count on your hand if you were honest with yourself for ninety seconds in a car.

Most of us have never asked the question in that form, and there's a reason. Being right is measured in a currency that has no column for this. You know whether you were correct. You know what it achieved. There's no line in that account for the cousin, the colleague, the woman who used to sit two rows in front and now sits at the back.

So the cost runs on, uncounted, and uncounted costs are the ones that do the damage over years.

She started keeping the number in a notebook in April, which sounds bleak and was actually the first honest thing she'd done about it. Not a list of grievances. A list of people she used to talk to and doesn't now, with the argument beside each one.

The list has six names on it. Every single argument on that list, she'd still win today.

You are able to count the cost of a victory without being asked to reverse the verdict. The written Word says knowledge puffs a person up while love builds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can do the building where the counting has been.

Why the Cost Stays Invisible

Here's the mechanism, and it's nobody's fault in particular.

Every argument you win is an event with a date. It has a beginning, a middle, a result, and the result arrives quickly enough to feel like a conclusion. Your brain files it as finished and moves on, which is what brains are for.

The cost doesn't have a date. It's a slow absence, distributed over months, made of messages that don't come and invitations that are no longer automatic. There's no moment where anybody hands you a bill, and a cost with no bill attached is a cost you will never spontaneously total.

That's why six names can accumulate over four years in a person who genuinely loves people and would be horrified to be described as combative. She wasn't keeping score of the losses because the losses never presented themselves as losses.

Puffed Up, or Built

Here's Paul, writing to a church that had knowledge in abundance and could not 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 something that stands up.

He grants the knowledge in the same sentence, without a hint of sarcasm: we all have knowledge. He isn't asking anybody to know less, and he never asks that anywhere in the letters.

What he's naming is that knowing and loving do two different operations on a person, and that they have been quietly competing in that congregation for a long time without anybody noticing which one was winning.

What you know inflates, and only love builds something that will stand. 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.

An Uncounted Cost Is the One That Compounds

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

Anything you count, you manage. That's why people keep accounts, weigh themselves, and track how far they ran. The counting isn't the discipline, the counting is what makes the discipline possible, and nothing that goes uncounted ever gets governed.

Six names took four years to accumulate precisely because they were never written down anywhere. Each one alone was explicable. Each one alone was even defensible. It's only the column that tells the truth.

That's the most useful sentence in this message, and also the most uncomfortable one. Write the number down, not as a rod for your own back, but so that it stops running in the dark where nobody can see it.

A cost you never total is the only kind that compounds forever. The written Word puts the inflating and the building side by side so you can see them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives you the nerve to look.

Nothing Here Says You Were Wrong Six Times

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

I'm not adjudicating a single one of those arguments. If you'd win them all again today, then you were right, and nothing here is a quiet suggestion that you concede positions you believe in order to shorten the list.

I'm also not telling you to apologize six times. Six apologies you don't mean would be worse than the silence, and every one of those people would hear it.

You can keep every verdict on that list and still write the number at the bottom. Scripture grants the knowledge in the same sentence as the limit, and the Holy Spirit does the rebuilding rather than the arbitrating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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