Whatsoever Is A Very Wide Word

Talia is sixteen and she has stopped doing anything, and nobody has noticed because what she has stopped doing was never visible.

Two adults she respects have told her, separately and kindly and without either of them knowing about the other conversation, that the other one is wrong about this.

Her aunt, who she has stayed with every summer since she was seven and who is the reason she reads anything at all, has a position and holds it warmly and has given her reasons.

The woman who runs the Wednesday thing at the church her friend goes to, who is about twenty-six and funny and has never once talked down to her, has the other position and holds it warmly and has given her reasons.

Neither of them said a single unkind word about anybody. That is what Talia would want on the record. They are both good.

And she has spent about seven months quietly doing nothing, because doing anything at all felt like picking, and picking felt like telling one of two people she loves that she thinks they are wrong.

She said it out loud in a kitchen, on a Sunday, drying up, to her mother, who is not really in any of this and had no idea it was happening.

Her mother said, "What did you want to do?"

Talia said something small and slightly embarrassing that she is not going to have written down here.

And her mother, who is not a theologian and has never claimed to be, said: "Would either of them tell you not to do that?"

Talia said no.

Her mother said, "Then it is not the thing they are arguing about, is it."

Talia said afterwards that it took her about a week to see how obvious that was, and that seven months of being stuck had been built on an assumption she had never examined, which was that everything in this subject was inside the argument.

Almost nothing in it is.

You may be stuck the same way. Between two people, or two churches, or two versions of a thing your family taught you. And the honest reason you have not started anything is not laziness and it is not doubt, it is that starting feels like voting. And nobody has ever asked you whether the thing you want to do is actually inside the disagreement at all.

Look How Wide That Word Is

There is a sentence in Colossians that people quote for its ending and that does its real work in the first word.

"And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him."Colossians 3:17

Whatsoever.

That is about as wide as a word gets. Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed. Not: in the following approved categories. Not: once the questions are settled. Whatsoever, which is to say the dishes, the walk to school, the thing with your hands, the sentence you send to somebody at eleven at night because you thought of them.

You have a field to work in that is vastly larger than the argument. Colossians 3 uses the widest available word and then attaches His name to it without conditions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it in a kitchen on a Sunday with a dish towel in it.

And notice what the verse does with the name. Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. The name goes on the ordinary thing. It is not reserved for the resolved, correct, agreed-upon act. It goes on the whatsoever, which by definition includes things nobody has ever had an argument about.

You were given a name to put over ordinary work rather than a verdict to obtain first. That is what the written word says about the range of this, and it is the Spirit of God who makes seven months of stuckness look like what it was, in about a week.

Nobody Here Is Asking You To Pick

Now be exact, because a page written for somebody stuck between two people she loves must not become a third voice with a position.

This site does not rule on the thing your aunt and the woman on a Wednesday disagree about. It does not lean toward either. It does not have a private view it is being tactful about, and it is not going to signal one by what it emphasizes.

Both of them are good, as you said. Nothing here contradicts that or ranks them.

You can start today without voting on anybody. It is written that whatsoever you do, and the word is deliberately unbounded, and His Spirit is the one who has been in the kitchen through all seven months of the not-starting.

And say the guard, because this whole site runs on it and you are sixteen and entitled to know exactly what you are reading. Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no side, no membership, no email, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included. You are as fully His with the argument untouched, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from becoming a third adult with an opinion.