Fully Persuaded, In Your Own Mind

Orla can give you four positions on this subject and defend any of them and she is frightened of being asked which one is hers.

She would not use the word frightened. She would say she is still thinking about it, and she has been still thinking about it for eleven years, and she is aware that at a certain point that becomes a different sentence.

It started sensibly. She came into all of this in her twenties without a background in it, and the honest and humble thing to do when you know nothing is to listen. So she listened. She read what people recommended. She adopted, provisionally, the position of whoever she was learning from at the time, which is what a person does.

The trouble is that she never stopped doing it.

She can now tell, in about forty seconds of conversation, which way somebody leans, and she has a very well developed set of things she can say that will not disagree with them. It is not dishonesty. She genuinely finds each position persuasive while she is standing inside it.

What she cannot do is say what she thinks when nobody is in the room.

Her friend Mairin, who has a house with an open fire and no interest in any of this, asked her in November, with rain on the window and no particular weight on it: "What do you actually reckon?"

Orla started to answer with something.

And Mairin, who was not being clever, said: "No, but what do you reckon?"

Orla said she could not tell her.

Mairin said, "You could tell me anything."

And Orla said, and this is the sentence: "It is not that I will not tell you. It is that I do not know, and I am forty-three, and I have been in this eleven years."

You may have borrowed too. It is not a character flaw and it usually starts as humility. And after long enough a person can arrive at a place where they can defend four positions and cannot locate one, and the specific fear is not of being wrong, it is of being asked. And nobody has ever put the question to you gently, or told you that Scripture actually expects you to have an answer of your own.

The Standard Is Your Own Mind

There is a chapter in Romans about a live and painful disagreement between believers, and in the middle of it Paul sets out a standard that is startling for how much it leaves to the individual.

"One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind."Romans 14:5

Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.

He does not resolve the disagreement. He is writing to people who were genuinely divided and he declines to hand down the answer, and instead he sets a standard about how a person is to hold whatever they hold.

Fully persuaded. That is not a low bar. It rules out drifting and it rules out repeating and it rules out holding a thing because a person you admire holds it.

In his own mind. That is the location, and it is the part that matters for somebody in Orla's position. Not in the room. Not in the conversation. In the place where you are when nobody has asked you anything.

You are being asked for something of your own rather than something correct. Romans 14 declines to settle the question and sets a standard about the holder instead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it in a lamplit room with rain on the window.

And notice that this is a permission before it is an obligation. The whole passage exists to protect people who differ from each other, and the standard is set precisely so that two people can hold two things and both be doing it properly.

You have been given room rather than an examination. That is what the written word does with an honest disagreement, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive as safety in somebody who has been afraid of the question for eleven years.

Nobody Here Wants Your Answer Either

Now be careful, because a page telling somebody to have their own position which then supplies one would be exactly the thing that got her here.

This site does not tell you what to think about this. It does not lean, it is not hinting, and it is not going to reward you for landing anywhere in particular.

And it does not need you to arrive at anything by the end of this page. Eleven years of borrowing does not resolve in an evening and nothing here is going to pretend otherwise.

You are allowed to say that you do not know. It is written that if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and upbraideth not means He does not tell you off for the asking, and His Spirit is the one who has been in every conversation where you found the safe thing to say.

And say the guard. Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no position, no declaration of where you stand, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all. You are as fully His with four positions and no answer, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from being one more person to agree with.