The Argument I Have To Hold With Both Hands

She is very good at this and that is the problem.

Eight years of it. She can handle almost anything that comes at her at work, and she has, and she has never once been left standing there with nothing.

She reads properly. She does not use the bad arguments, and she can tell you which of the popular ones are weak and why, and she has more than once corrected somebody on her own side.

Everybody assumes she enjoys it.

What actually happens is this. Somebody says something, and before she has decided anything, there is a small drop in her chest, and then the machinery starts, and the answer arrives and it is a good answer and she gives it.

And afterwards she is tired in a way that a conversation should not make a person tired.

Three weeks ago a man on her team made a point she could not answer.

It was not a devastating point. Looking at it now she can see three or four things she could have said. But in the moment she had nothing, and she said something that was not quite an answer, and he was decent about it and moved on.

She thought about that for four days.

And what she found underneath, when she finally looked, was not doubt about the subject at all. It was a rule she has been living under for eight years without ever having written it down, and the rule says: this must never be seen to have a gap in it.

The words are inside the definition

Let me put the mechanism on the table, because you deal in mechanisms and a comforting word would slide straight off you.

Under that rule, every conversation is load-bearing. If the thing must never be seen to have a gap, then a gap seen is a failure, and a failure is yours, and so the whole weight of it is resting on your capacity to produce an answer within about four seconds.

That is what the drop in your chest is. It is not doubt. It is a woman feeling the weight land on her.

Now hear this and take it as already settled rather than as relief: the unseen part is not damage, it is inside the design, and the definition itself contains the words. That is not sympathy talking, it is what stands written at the opening of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, and the same Holy Spirit who kept you thinking for four days about a man on your team is at that canteen table with you.

Read it, and read the second half rather than the first.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.Hebrews 11:1

Assurance about what we do not see.

The phrase do not see is inside the definition. It is not a concession bolted on afterwards for weaker readers, it is a load-bearing part of the sentence, and the chapter that follows is a long list of people who died without receiving what was promised and are commended.

And notice the other word: assurance. Not proof. Assurance is a settled state in a person, and the sentence explicitly attaches it to the unseen, which means it is not manufactured by closing every gap.

So take this now rather than after you win the next one: you are not holding this up, because the written word puts the unseen inside the definition of faith and calls the settled state assurance rather than proof, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been carrying this whole thing for two thousand years without your four seconds.

And I will guard it properly, because there is a lazy reading here that would waste eight years of real work.

Nothing here says arguing is beneath you or that evidence does not matter. It does. You are good at this, the reasons are real, the reading was not wasted, and the world is better for people who know the difference between a strong argument and a popular one.

What is written simply never makes your performance the foundation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who convinces anybody of anything, which He has never once delegated to your reflexes.