A Very Small Thing To Be Judged

It was one sentence and it was not even unkind.

Somebody looked at what he had done and said it felt rushed. That is all. No temper in it, no history behind it, said in passing by a person who then moved on to the next item on the list and has almost certainly not thought about it since.

That was Tuesday. It is Thursday and he has not eaten properly.

He is forty one years old. He knows this is disproportionate. He could give you a completely lucid account of why it is disproportionate, and the account would be correct, and it would not touch the thing at all.

Because it is not really about the work. He knows that too. He knows that if it were about the work he would have looked at it again, agreed or disagreed, made a change or not, and gone home. That is what happens with the other ninety per cent of the notes he gets.

This one landed somewhere else. It went past the work and into the middle of him, and once it was in there it turned into a sentence about what he is, and the sentence has been running for two days.

He cannot say any of this to anybody because the size of the reaction is embarrassing and the trigger is so small that describing it out loud makes him sound unwell.

You may know that plate. One remark, not cruel, not even wrong necessarily, that went a great deal further in than it had any business going, and a private shame about how far it went.

Paul had a category for this

Here is a man writing to people who were actively assessing him, and the phrase he uses is astonishing.

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self.1 Corinthians 4:3

A very small thing.

He does not say their judgement is wrong. He does not argue with it. He puts it in a category, and the category is small, and then he says something even stranger: he does not judge himself either.

That second half is the part I want for you, because that is where you actually live. It is not the other person's sentence that has been running for two days. You took their sentence and you turned it into your own verdict, and it is your own voice that has been saying it since Tuesday.

You are not the judge in your own case, and you were never appointed to it. 1 Corinthians 4:3 has Paul declining both the court and the bench, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man out of a trial he has been running against himself since Tuesday.

Now let me be careful, because there is a wrong turn here that would do you harm.

I am not telling you the note was worthless or that you should care less about your work. Caring about the work is not the problem and it is not a fault, and I am not going to treat your standards as a thing to be repented of. If the note is right, it is right, and you will make it better, and that is a good day's work.

The problem is not that the criticism reached the work. It is that it kept going.

You are loved at a level nothing anybody says about your work can reach. The written word puts human assessment in the small category and reserves the verdict for the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person's standing out of the reach of a passing remark.

Here is what I think happened on Tuesday, and it is worth knowing rather than being ashamed of. Somewhere in you the two things are joined: what I make and what I am. So an assessment of one arrives as an assessment of the other, automatically, before you have any say in it. That is not weakness. It is a join, and joins can be separated, and the separation is done with your mouth rather than with your feelings.

The honest half: the join will probably be there again next month, and separating it will be work again, and I am not promising you that one evening fixes a wiring you have had for thirty years.

But you can do it tonight, on this one, out loud, and it takes about fifteen seconds.