Before One Court Only

Ari has been writing an appeal for four years and has never sent one.

It is not a document. It would be easier if it were, because a document could be finished and put in a drawer. It is a running argument that he conducts while he is doing other things: driving, waiting for a kettle, lying in the dark at the end of a day that was otherwise fine.

He is very good at it. He has been good at arguments since he was nine.

He has a version for people who know the whole story and a version for people who only know the headline. He has a version that concedes the main point immediately, which he considers his strongest, and a version that begins with the context, which he knows is weaker but which he keeps returning to because it is the truest one.

And in four years he has delivered exactly none of them, because there is nobody to deliver them to.

That is what took him so long to see, and when he saw it he sat down.

There is no panel. There is no chairman. There is no room where a group of people are considering the matter of Ari and would receive submissions. There are simply several hundred people with a general impression, most of whom think about it never, and about nine who think about it sometimes, and four who think about it a great deal because they were in it.

He has been preparing for a hearing that does not exist. Four years of the best legal mind in the family, working full time, for a court that was never convened.

And the four who think about it a great deal are not a panel either. They are people who were hurt. They are not sitting in judgement, they are living with something, and treating them as a tribunal to be persuaded would be one more way of making their experience about him.

And this is where I stop writing about Ari, because you have been drafting something.

I am not going to ask what happened, and I am not going to help you improve the argument, because the argument is not the problem.

Whose servant are you

I want to hand you a question Paul asks in the middle of an argument about something else entirely, which is often where the most useful sentences are.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth.Romans 14:4

The setting is a dispute in a church about food and days, and Paul stops it with a piece of household law that everybody in the ancient world understood instantly.

A servant in that world answered to one household. Not to the street. Not to the neighbors. Not to the opinion of the market. His standing was a matter between him and his own master, and for anybody else to pronounce on it was not merely unkind, it was a category error. They did not have the authority. It was not their servant.

Now hear the phrase that does the work: to his own master he standeth or falleth.

Standeth or falleth. Both outcomes belong in the same place. This is not a verse that says everything you did was fine. It says the matter of your standing is heard in one house and no other, and that the house has a master who is not indifferent and is also not a crowd.

So take that in the car with the argument running. You are answerable in one place and it is not the place you have been drafting for, and Romans 14:4 says to his own master he standeth or falleth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to stop rehearsing.

And then Paul finishes the verse, and it is the part that will let you sleep. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.

Not he will manage to stay standing. He shall be holden up, by somebody else's hands. The written word puts the holding in God's hands rather than in the quality of your defense, and the Spirit of God has been doing that holding through all four years of a hearing that never sat.