Leaving Off Before It Starts

Vaughan had the reply written by half nine and he was still reading it back at twenty past eleven.

It was a good reply. He would say that himself. It had three points and it had a verse in it and it had a line near the end that he was genuinely pleased with, and he had taken out the sarcastic bit twice and put it back in once.

The thread was on a group he has been in for six years, about this subject, which had started as a question somebody asked in good faith on a Tuesday and had, by Thursday, become the thing those threads become.

He is not going to characterize anybody in it and neither is this article. There were people in there he respects on both sides of it and they all meant it.

His wife Nerys came down at about twenty past eleven for water and saw him at the table with the phone in both hands and the lamp on.

She said, "Still?"

He said he was nearly done.

And she said, not sharply, on her way back up: "You've been nearly done since Tuesday."

He sat there.

And what he noticed, sitting there, is the thing this article is about. He had wanted, on Monday, before any of it, to start doing something small and ordinary that he had been thinking about for a while. Nothing dramatic. A thing with his hands, on his own, for God.

And he had not done it, on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, because every evening had been spent composing.

The subject of that thread was honoring God. The three points were all about honoring God. He had spent four evenings and about eleven hours becoming better at arguing about honoring God and had, in that time, honored God with precisely nothing.

He put the phone face down. He did not send it. He has not sent it and he is not going to.

You may have a reply half written. Or you may have spent years around this particular argument, watching it, forming a position, getting sharper at it. And nobody has ever pointed out what it costs to be in that thread, or that the cost is not usually the argument itself.

Leaving Off Is Named As A Skill

There is a line in Proverbs about arguments that is unusual, because it does not tell you how to win one or how to be right in one. It tells you when to get out.

"The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water: therefore leave off contention, before it be meddled with."Proverbs 17:14

The image is a breach. Somebody makes a small hole in a bank, and at first it is a trickle, and there is a moment when a hand and a bit of clay would fix it, and after that moment there is no fixing it because there is no hole any more, there is only water.

And then the instruction. Leave off contention before it be meddled with. Before it is stirred, before it is worked at. Not after you have won it. Not once the other side has conceded. Before.

You are being handed a skill rather than a verdict. Proverbs 17 tells a person when to step out and never once tells them who was right, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient image about a leaking bank and puts it on a kitchen table at twenty past eleven.

And notice what leaving off is not. It is not agreeing. It is not conceding. It is not deciding the other position is correct, and Proverbs would have said so if it meant that. It is a decision about your own hands and where they are going to be, and it settles nothing about the question.

You have been given permission to step out of it without anybody being declared wrong. That is what the written word says about contention, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that read as a way out rather than as a loss.

This Site Does Not Have A Verdict For You

Now be clear about what this page is and is not doing, because a page about declining an argument that quietly settles it in passing would be the worst kind of dishonest.

This site does not rule on whether a Christian is obliged in this. It does not lean. It does not tell you which of the people in that thread had the better of it, and it does not tell you what the answer would be if we were the sort of site that answered.

That is not evasion and it is not cowardice. It is that the question belongs somewhere else, and there are people who will engage with it properly, and this is a place for a person who wants to honor God today and cannot get to it because the argument is in the way.

You can honor God today with the question still completely open. It is written that whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, which does not wait on a conclusion about anything, and His Spirit is the one who has been waiting in the room while four evenings went into a reply.

And say the guard, since it is this whole site's guarantee. Nothing on this page asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no position, no side, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included. You are as fully His with the whole thing unresolved, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from handing you a verdict dressed up as care.