Everybody Measuring Everybody

She has been standing at the corner of the food table for eleven minutes holding a plate she has not put anything on, and she is working.

Nobody would call it working. To the patio she is a woman waiting politely for the line to clear, smiling at a nephew going past with a bottle of soda in each hand. Under that, she is running numbers, and she has been running them since she came through the gate at six.

Her cousin, over by the lights, has three people around her and has not stopped talking since she arrived, and every one of those three is leaning in. That gets logged. The aunt who prayed over the food was asked to pray, which means somebody chose her, and that gets logged too. Her brother's wife is at the far end with a child asleep across her shoulder, and the ease of that, the way the child went to her without being handed over, goes into the column that has been open since she was nineteen. Her own daughter is on the wall by the herbs with headphones half in, being polite to a grandmother, and there is a whole page about that.

And here is the sentence she would never say out loud, the one that is actually keeping her at the corner of the table with an empty plate: everyone here has something that comes to them easily, and I have to work for the same thing, and I have been working for it all evening and I have got about a third of the way.

Now look across the patio, because this is the part she cannot see.

Her cousin, the one with three people leaning in, glanced over at her twice in the last ten minutes. Once when she came through the gate and once just now. And what the cousin is thinking, while talking without stopping, is that she wishes she could stand still at the edge of a family evening the way that woman does, quiet, self contained, not needing to fill every silence, not talking because she is frightened of the gap. The cousin has been measuring herself against her since six o'clock. They are standing eight steps apart, on the same patio, under the same lights, each one grading herself against the other, at the same moment, in opposite directions.

Neither of them thinks she is doing anything. If you asked either one, both would say the same word. Looking. I was only looking.

Maybe you are reading this at your own version of that table. It does not have to be a patio. It is any room where you find yourself at the edge with a plate you have not filled, doing arithmetic that nobody in the room knows you are doing, on people who are almost certainly doing it back.

Paul does not call it wicked, he calls it useless

I want to be careful here, because you have been shamed about this before and it did not help you, and I am not going to do it again.

Paul writes a line about people who spend their lives comparing themselves with one another, and the word he lands on is not the one you are braced for.

For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.2 Corinthians 10:12

Not wise. Not filthy, not shameful, not the mark of a small soul. Unwise, which is a very specific charge. He is saying the method does not work. You can run it all evening with total sincerity and come away knowing nothing, because the instrument you are holding has nothing true in it to measure against. You are laying your inside against somebody's outside and calling the result information.

And the patio proves it, better than any argument I could make. She measures herself against the cousin and comes up short. The cousin measures herself against her and comes up short. Both readings cannot be right, and in fact neither of them is. That is not two women failing at humility. That is one broken instrument being handled by two honest people.

You are not a shallow person for looking, and the fault in the reading is in the ruler and not in you. 2 Corinthians 10:12 says plainly that measuring yourselves by yourselves is unwise rather than wicked, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a broken method and lets a woman at the corner of a table put the plate down without adding shame to the evening she was already having.

So let me name what you were actually doing out there, because it was not vanity. You were hungry. You looked around a patio for evidence that there is a place in the world that is yours, that fits, that comes to you the way other people's places seem to come to them. That is a hunger and it is a good one, and you took it to the only instrument you had. It gave you a false reading, twice, in both directions, all evening.

You were hungry for a portion, not for a higher score, and the hunger under the arithmetic was never the problem. It is written in Psalm 16 that the Lord Himself is the portion, and the Spirit is the One who carries that into a woman standing eight steps from her cousin, so she can stop reading the room and start receiving.

The line was thrown before you got to the gate

Here is the psalm, and it is a surveyor's picture, which is why it belongs on a patio full of quiet measuring.

The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.Psalm 16:5-6

In the old world a portion of land was measured out with a cord, and where the cord fell decided what was yours. David says the lines have fallen. Past tense, and not by him. Somebody else threw the measuring cord, and it landed, and the land inside it is his, and no amount of looking over the hedge at the next portion moves a single peg.

That is the thing your evening did not know. You went to the patio to find out your size by comparison, and your portion had already been measured out by God before you came through the gate, and it is not on the market, and it is not in competition with the cousin under the lights.

You are holding a portion that was measured out for you by God, and no reading you take off another person's evening can shrink it or enlarge it. Psalm 16:5-6 says the lines are fallen and He maintains the lot, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a surveyor's line out of an old psalm and drops it around the actual feet of somebody standing at the corner of a food table with an empty plate.

And notice which part David calls the good part. Not the acreage. He says the Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup. The land is pleasant, and the reason it is pleasant is who is in it with him. That is why this cannot be fixed by deciding your life is better than you thought. It is not an upgraded score. It is a Person, standing inside your own measured ground, at eight o'clock in the evening, with the lights on over the table.

You have the Lord Himself as your portion tonight, and He is not divided up according to how the evening went. It is written that He is the portion of the inheritance and of the cup, and His Spirit is the One who makes that a thing you can actually receive on a patio rather than a fine idea you agree with and walk away from.