I Asked for Proof and Got a Person

Her brother is not hostile. That is worth establishing first, because it changes what she has been asking for.

He is thoughtful and he is fair and he has read more than she has, and about four years ago he stopped believing any of it, and he told her so in a way that was gentle and considered and completely devastating.

They still see each other most weeks. He asks after her. He came and helped when the boiler went.

And she has been asking God for four years for something she could show him.

Not a trick. She would be offended at the suggestion. What she wants is something that would be difficult for a fair minded person to explain away, because he is a fair minded person, and because she has watched him weigh things her whole life and knows that he would weigh this too if there were anything on the scale.

She is thirty eight. She has read a great deal in four years. She can make several of the arguments now and she has made two of them at that table and both times he was kind about it.

Here is what she has not admitted to herself until quite recently.

She wants to win, and she wants to win because she loves him, and those two things are so tangled that she cannot get a knife between them.

The sentence, unsaid: I have been asking God for ammunition and calling it faith.

You may know that table. Somebody you love on the other side of it, and years of wanting one thing you could put down in front of them.

He names the evidence Himself

There is one place where Jesus says what the evidence is going to be, and He says it the night before He dies, which is when people say the things that matter most.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.John 13:35

Read the construction. By this shall all men know. That is an evidential claim. He is naming the thing by which the watching world is going to make its assessment, and He does not name an argument and He does not name a sign.

He names love between the people who follow Him.

That is a strange choice if you want something portable. You cannot carry it into a conversation. It is not a thing one person can produce at a table. It is slow, and it happens between people over time, and there is no version of it that fits into an evening.

You are being handed the one evidence He actually named, and John 13:35 makes love between His people the thing by which all men know, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a sentence said on the last night and lands it on a woman at a kitchen table with her brother across from her.

Not portable, and that is the point

Consider why that form was chosen, because it looks like a weakness and it is not.

An argument can be answered. A sign can be doubted by anybody who was not in the room, and honestly by somebody who was. Both of those are the kind of thing a fair minded man weighs and sets down again, which is precisely what her brother would do and what he has already done twice.

Love over years is a different category of object. It cannot be answered because it is not a claim. It cannot be doubted from outside because it is happening to him.

And it does not require him to be less intelligent than he is, which matters enormously to her, because she has never once wanted to win by him being smaller. Everything she has tried so far has asked him to be worse at thinking than he is. This one asks nothing of his mind at all and does not insult it, which is the first thing in four years that has been worthy of the man she is talking to.

You have been asking for the kind of evidence he could put down, because the written word names something that operates on a person rather than something they assess, and His Spirit is what turns that from a clever point into an actual relief.

And notice the scope of the claim. All men. Jesus is not describing an internal comfort for believers. He is making a public statement about how the world at large will come to a conclusion, and He rests the whole thing on one thing happening between people.

You are inside the mechanism He named for the whole world, and John 13 puts the evidence in the relationships rather than in the arguments, and the same Spirit who pours out love in a heart is the one who fills.

Wanting to win is not a sin

Now the tangle she has finally admitted to, because it deserves better than being called pride.

She wants to win and she wants him back and she cannot separate them. That is not a character defect. That is what love does when it is frightened, and there is no version of loving somebody that does not want to be right about the most important thing in the world when they are on the other side of it.

Nothing in John 13 shames that. It simply hands her a different instrument, and the different instrument is one she has already been using every week for four years without counting it.

Because she has kept seeing him. That is the part she has never entered in the ledger. Four years of a woman who believes the most important thing in the world and did not go cold on a brother who does not, and who let him come and help with the boiler and did not use the evening for anything. That is not the gap between attempts. That was the attempt, the whole time.

You were never wrong to want him back, because John 13:35 corrects the instrument and never the affection, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief for a woman who has been quietly worried about her own motives.