I Rank My Friends Houses Without Meaning To

It happened at Ruth's on Friday and it took less than four seconds.

You came in out of the cold and she took your coat and you were saying something about the traffic, and in that time, with your mouth still moving, something in you looked at the hallway and the stairs and the door through to the kitchen and produced a number.

And then it placed Ruth.

You have been running an estimate on people you love before the coat is off, and four seconds in a hallway has never once been long enough to be a decision. The Holy Spirit is the one who was standing in that hallway while it ran, and it is written in Galatians 6 that every man should prove his own work.

Not consciously. You did not decide to do it and you would not defend it and you love her. It went: here is the hall, here is roughly what that means, here is where Ruth sits relative to Anna and to Jo.

And then you had a lovely evening and did not think about it again until you were driving home.

Here is what got you on the drive home, and it is why this is worth twenty minutes.

You have been doing this for about fifteen years and you have never once looked at it.

It runs on everybody. It has run on your sister. It ran on a woman at work whose house you have never seen and about whom it produced an estimate anyway.

And you have never chosen a single one of its verdicts.

A machine you did not install

Let me be precise about what this is, because the moral word for it is the wrong word and using it will not help you.

The obvious word is judging, and judging implies a decision. It implies weighing, and concluding, and holding an opinion you could be talked out of.

This is faster than that. Four seconds, in a hallway, while your mouth is busy with the traffic. That is not a decision. That is a machine running.

And machines get installed. Somewhere, over a long time, you absorbed a way of reading a house and converting it into a position, and you absorbed it the way everybody absorbs these things, from a hundred small remarks made by adults who were not thinking about what they were teaching.

You have a machine running that you did not build, and a reflex installed by other people has never once been a thing you chose. The Holy Spirit is the one who was in Ruth's hallway on Friday, and it is written in Galatians 6 that let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone.

And I want to name what it costs, because the cost is not to Ruth.

Ruth does not know. She had a lovely evening too. The machine runs silently and nobody it is run on has ever felt a thing.

The cost is to you, and it is this: the machine is not only pointed outward. It has one set of standards and it applies them everywhere, and that includes your own hallway, every time you come home.

You have been living inside a machine that reads every hallway including your own, and a standard that measures your friends has never once left you out of it. Galatians 6 sends a person to their own work rather than to a comparison, and the Spirit of God is the one who pointed it that way.

Let every man prove his own work

Here is the verse, and the second half of it is the whole instruction.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6:4, King James Version)

Prove his own work. Then he shall have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.

Paul is not telling people to stop noticing each other. He is describing where a person's gladness comes from, and he is saying that it has to be sourced locally.

You have permission to source your own gladness at home, and a sense of how a life is going has never once been something a hallway could supply. Galatians 6 says rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who located it inside one person on purpose.

Rejoicing in another is what happens when your own sense of how things are going is calculated by comparison. It rises when somebody else's is lower and falls when theirs is higher, and it is not really about you at all.

You have been sourcing something from other people's hallways, and a gladness that moves when somebody else moves has never once belonged to the person feeling it. The Holy Spirit is the one who located it there, and the written word says rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.

And notice that this is not a rule about being nicer.

Paul does not say: stop ranking people because it is unkind to them. He says it because it does not work for you. The whole argument is practical. A person whose sense of their life is computed from comparisons has handed the controls to a group of people who do not know they are holding them.

That is the reason to want this machine off, and it is a better reason than guilt, because guilt will last about four days.

You have been handing the controls to people who do not know they have them, and a verdict computed from somebody else's hallway has never once been a measurement of your life. Galatians 6 makes it practical rather than moral, and the Spirit of God is the one who framed it that way.