The Grade I Give Myself Every Evening

You do a round at about half past nine.

It is not deliberate. You go through to turn a lamp off and your eyes do a circuit of the room, and by the time you reach the door you have a mark.

Nine out of ten rooms did all right today. The living room let the side down. Overall: not great.

That mark is about you. Not about the room. And you carry it up the stairs and it sits on the whole evening.

Here is what is remarkable about this, and I want you to see it as clearly as I do.

There is a grading system operating in your house, nightly, with a rubric, and you are the examiner and the candidate and the only person who has ever seen the results.

It has run for years. It has never once produced a pass. And nobody else on earth has been consulted about the standard.

Let me go at the standard, because the marking is not the problem. The marking is accurate. It is the paper that is wrong.

Measuring yourself by yourself is not wise

There is a line in second Corinthians about a specific kind of assessment, and Paul is unusually blunt about it.

But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. (2 Corinthians 10:12, King James Version)

Measuring themselves by themselves. A closed system, with no external reference, where the standard and the assessment and the subject are all the same person.

And the verdict on it is: not wise. Not harsh, not proud, not humble. Unwise, which is a word about the method rather than the character of the one using it.

You are not graded by anybody who counts, and no evening inspection has ever once produced a real mark. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman doing a circuit of her own living room at half past nine, and Second Corinthians 10:12 calls a self referencing measurement unwise by name.

And notice what makes it unwise rather than wicked.

A closed system produces numbers that feel precise and mean nothing. You get a mark. It has a decimal feel to it. And it is generated entirely inside a room where you set the standard, so it can never be checked and can never be appealed.

You have been receiving precise numbers that mean nothing, and precision has never once been the same as accuracy. The written word names the closed loop and calls it unwise, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who has never once passed her own inspection.

The paper is impossible

Let me show you the actual rubric, because it has never once been written down.

To pass, all rooms in a house containing people must be simultaneously in their evening state at one moment in the day, on a day when people also lived in them.

That is the standard. Written out like that, it is obviously impossible, and it is exactly the one you have been marking against for years.

You have been sitting an impossible paper nightly, and the failure has never once been about how hard you worked at it. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has never seen her own rubric written out, and Second Corinthians 10:12 rejects the whole method rather than the effort.

And here is the cruelty of a system with no external reference.

If somebody else set the standard, you could ask them about it. You could find out they were wrong, or unreasonable, or that they had changed their mind. There is nobody to ask. The examiner is you, at half past nine, tired, and the examiner has never been questioned once.

You have an examiner who has never once been questioned, and a tired woman at half past nine has never once been a fair judge of anything. The written word calls for an external reference and refuses the closed loop, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been examined nightly by the most exhausted person in the house.

Failing it on purpose

So here is tonight, and it is designed to break the system rather than pass it.

Leave one thing out on purpose. Deliberately. Knowing that the round at half past nine will see it.

You are able to fail it deliberately, and a deliberate failure has never once been the same as a real one. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman walking past a lamp and leaving the room as it is, and Second Corinthians 10:12 rejects the whole apparatus.

Here is why deliberate is the whole thing.

A system only has authority over somebody who is trying to pass it. Fail it on purpose, go to bed, and get up the same woman, and the apparatus is exposed as something that was never measuring anything.

You cannot argue a grading system out of existence. You can only walk past it.

You are walking past something you could never have argued with, and no system like that has ever once survived being ignored. The written word simply names the method as unwise and moves on, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a woman going up the stairs past a room that has not passed.