Still the Blunt One

She says things.

Not cruelly. She would fight anybody who called it cruel and she would win, because in fifty eight years she has never once said something to wound. What she does is say the accurate thing at the moment when everybody else in the room has decided to go round it, and she does it without a run up.

It has cost her. She knows exactly what it has cost her and she could list the occasions.

Her family calls her the blunt one, affectionately, mostly. There is a way her daughter in law goes still for about a second when she starts a sentence, and she has noticed it for four years and has never mentioned noticing it.

Here is what she has never told a living soul.

When she asked to be filled, at fifty five, in her own front room, there was a part of her that was asking for something else at the same time. Not out loud and not in words. Underneath the asking there was a request that she would come out of it softer. Rounder. The kind of woman whose daughter in law does not go still.

Three years later she is exactly as she was.

And she has read that, quietly, for three years, as the answer to the second request rather than as anything about the first.

The sentence, unsaid: He left the thing in that I asked Him to take out.

You may know that request. The thing about yourself you were hoping this would quietly fix.

The same God works all of it

There is a short verse in the middle of a long passage about variety, and the middle clause of it is the whole answer.

And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.1 Corinthians 12:6

Read the structure. Diversities, plural, of operations. And then the same God working all of it in all of them.

Paul is not describing one correct output with a tolerance for deviation. He is describing a range of genuinely different things, all of which are produced by one God, and he says so three times in three verses with three different words.

You are one of the diversities rather than a departure from the norm, and 1 Corinthians 12:6 puts the variety and the single source in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes an argument written to a comparing church and lands it on a woman on a porch at fifty eight.

Worketh all in all

Consider the last phrase, because it is doing more than it looks.

Worketh all in all. God is described as the one actively producing the whole range, in every one of the people concerned. Not permitting the range. Not tolerating it. Working it.

Which means the thing her family calls the blunt one is not a piece of raw material God is waiting to plane down. It is on the list of operations, and the operator is named in the same verse.

You are not a deviation He is working around, because the written word makes God the active producer of every one of the diversities, and the Spirit of God is what turns a verse about a divided congregation into three years reread.

And notice why Paul is saying it at all. That church had begun sorting itself by what people could do, and the whole passage exists to stop them. He is not writing to encourage individuality for its own sake. He is writing to stop people measuring each other against one preferred output, which is precisely the measurement she has been running on herself since she was fifty five.

You have been running a comparison Paul wrote a chapter to end, and 1 Corinthians 12 exists to stop exactly that sorting, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who fills.

The plainness is not the problem

Now the honest part, because there is something real underneath her second request and it deserves not to be dismissed.

The daughter in law goes still, and that is real. Something about how she says things lands harder than she means it to sometimes, and a woman who has noticed that for four years without mentioning it is not somebody in denial.

But there is a difference between a thing needing care and a thing needing removal, and she has been asking God for the second when the first was the actual question.

And the care is smaller than the removal by a long way. It is a beat before a sentence rather than a different woman saying it. Four years of watching her daughter in law go still is four years of information she has never once acted on, and the acting on it does not require her to stop saying accurate things. It requires her to say one of them slightly later than she otherwise would. Nobody who says accurate things needs to become a woman who does not. What a plain woman needs is what a loud room needs and what a quiet one needs, which is the love that Scripture says the Spirit pours in, running underneath the thing she already is.

You have been given the love that runs through the plainness rather than a removal of it, because 1 Corinthians 12:6 puts the operations in God's hands and never suggests a correct type, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief for a woman who has been half apologizing for herself for three years.