He Can Argue Both Sides Perfectly

He can build his brother's case better than his brother can build it.

He can build his sister's better than she has ever managed, and she is the more articulate of the two.

He has done both, in his head, on a particular stretch of road, something like a hundred times over four years. He can find the exact sentence where the two accounts part company. He can tell you which of the two facts in dispute is actually load bearing and which one everybody argues about instead.

He understands the whole thing completely.

And not one person is any better off for it.

Here is the theory he was working on, and he has never said it out loud to anybody, because said out loud it sounds like arrogance and it was not arrogance, it was hope.

If he understood it well enough, he could fix it.

That was genuinely the plan. Get the whole thing clear, hold both versions honestly, find the misunderstanding at the bottom, and then at some point be able to explain each of them to the other in a way that would land.

He understands it completely now. He has for about two years.

They are exactly as far apart as they were.

And what has started to sit on him, on that road, is a suspicion that the understanding was never going to do anything at all, and that four years of the most careful thinking he has ever done has been four years of a man doing something that felt like helping.

If you have understood something completely and it has not helped, pull up a chair. There is coffee and nobody here is asking you to explain anything.

What knowledge amounts to on its own

There is a list of impressive things in a famous chapter, and the striking part is what gets put in the failing column.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.1 Corinthians 13:2

Understand all mysteries, and all knowledge.

That is the ceiling. Not partial understanding, not a good grasp. All of it, complete, and it is placed in a sentence whose conclusion is I am nothing.

And notice that it is not attacked. Paul does not say the knowledge is false, or that the mysteries were not understood. He grants the whole thing and then says it does not do what people assume it does.

You are holding a complete understanding that Scripture already told you would not be enough on its own. 1 Corinthians 13:2 puts understanding all mysteries and all knowledge on the losing side of the sentence and does not dispute the knowledge itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that ranking in the chapter about love rather than in a chapter about pride, which means four years of accurate thinking was never wasted and was also never going to mend anything by itself.

What the four years actually were

Now the theory, because it deserves respect before it gets set down.

It was hope. Not vanity.

A man who spends four years constructing both sides of a quarrel he did not start is a man trying to find a door. Nobody does that out of intellectual interest. You did it because you love both of them and because understanding is the tool you actually have, and so you used the tool you had, harder and harder, for four years.

You were reaching for a door with the only instrument in your hand, and no verse anywhere blames a person for using what they have. Exodus 4:2 has God asking what is that in thine hand and starting from what a man was already holding, and it is the same Spirit who works through what a person actually is rather than through what they wish they were, which means four years of thinking was the right instinct aimed at a lock it does not open.

What is left when the case is put down

Here is the question underneath all of it, and it is worth asking plainly.

If understanding does not mend it, what is there to do?

The chapter answers that, and the answer is deliberately unimpressive. Charity suffereth long, and is kind. It bears, believes, hopes, endures. None of those are achievements. Every one of them is a way of staying.

You are left with something smaller than a solution and considerably more durable. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and every one of those verbs is about remaining rather than resolving, and it is the same Spirit who works that love in a person, which means what is available to you now is presence rather than a plan, and presence was always the part that was going to outlast the quarrel.