Standing On The Same Ground

They are arguing about a strip of ground that is under both of them, and neither has looked down in twenty minutes.

Low light. The kind that comes in flat across a slope at the end of the day and makes every tussock throw a shadow twice its own length. There is a boundary post between them that has been leaning the same three degrees since before either of them was born, and a wire that goes off into the gorse and stops meaning anything about forty yards along.

Two cousins. Same grandmother. They learned to swim in the same water and were taken to the same funerals in the same borrowed jackets.

One of them has the paper. The other one has the story. Neither the paper nor the story is wrong, which is precisely why this has been going for two and a half years, and if either of them had been plainly in the wrong it would have been over in two weeks.

They are both raising their voices slightly, which for these two men counts as a great deal. The wind takes some of it. One of them says the thing about the year the water came up. The other one has been waiting for the thing about the year the water came up and has an answer ready that he has been carrying since March.

And under both of them, unremarked, is the ground.

The same soil. Their boots are eleven feet apart in it. It grew what fed both their households when they were small, and it does not know either of their names, and it will be there in exactly this condition long after the argument has been won by somebody.

The light goes. They walk back separately, on the same track, twenty yards apart, at the same speed.

That is you, and your boundary post might be a business, a family house, a name on a document, or a church you both love and are on two sides of.

Before anything else, and this comes first. If the person in your version of this frightens you, hurts you, or makes you pay for existing, nothing on this page is telling you to stand out there and take it. Standing has never once meant staying somewhere unsafe. Tell one person today who can act: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come. Do that first.

And second, plainly: nothing here decides who owns the strip, is not going to send you across the field tonight, and is not going to promise you that he softens. It is going to take one man out of a position he was never supposed to be standing in.

Paul allows for the quarrel and then relocates it

There is a sentence that assumes there is a real dispute, which is unusual, and it is the assumption that makes it usable out on a slope.

Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.Colossians 3:13

If any man have a quarrel against any. Paul does not pretend nobody has grounds. He writes the grievance into the sentence. He allows that it is real, that there is something to have, and he does not ask anybody to say there is not.

Then forbearing, which is an old word for holding steady with somebody, staying in the same field as them, not walking off. And then forgiving, which is not the same as agreeing and is not the same as conceding a strip of land.

And then the measure, and the measure is not the other man's behavior. Even as Christ forgave you. Not: as much as he deserves. Not: proportionate to how he has been about it. The measure sits entirely outside the argument and it was settled before either cousin was born.

You are able to hold steady with him without giving up one inch of what you believe about the boundary. That is not a soft word for a man on a slope: Colossians 3:13 writes the quarrel into the sentence and then puts the measure outside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a relocated thing stay relocated in a man carrying an answer since March rather than the amount of magnanimity anybody can produce in a wind.

Both of you are standing on it

Here is the picture, and it is not a metaphor somebody bolted on afterward. It is the actual physical fact of that field.

The thing they are fighting over is holding both of them up. It is under the boots of the man with the paper and it is under the boots of the man with the story, at the same moment, at the same depth, and it has been doing that all their lives.

Which is exactly the shape of what Scripture says about two people in a family. The struggle is not against flesh and blood. Whatever this actually is, it is not the cousin, and it never has been, and the reason it has taken two and a half years is not that either man is malicious. It is that a gap in the evidence got filled in the same direction, over and over, by two men who both learned to swim in the same water.

You have been reading a man you have known your whole life from a position he was never actually standing in. The written word takes flesh and blood off the list entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who lifts a person out of a slot that two and a half years built, never a cousin's ability to feel warm about him on the walk back.

There is no technique in any of this. Nothing on this page is a sequence you could perform correctly or incorrectly, because the moment a thing can be got wrong, the whole weight of the outcome slides back onto the man doing it, and that weight has been on your shoulders since the paper came out of the drawer and it does not belong there.

You are free to stop needing him to concede, and the boundary question is not going anywhere while you stop. Scripture puts the opponent somewhere that is not a person, and His Spirit is what makes that land in a body rather than being a thing a man agrees with and then goes home twenty yards apart.