corrupt code

chapter one

the world’s word for something older

Let us start with the flagship phrase, the one everybody knows by now. Emotional intelligence. The idea, roughly, is that there is a kind of smarts that has nothing at all to do with book-learning, a competence in reading yourself and reading the room, in governing your own reactions and answering the people around you wisely, and that this competence has a name and can be measured and taught. And it is a real thing. I am not here to sneer at it. People who have it do move through life more gracefully than people who do not, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

But open the Book of Proverbs, which was old when Rome was young, and tell me what you find there. An entire library on precisely this. You find wisdom, which is not raw brainpower but the skill of living well. You find prudence, which is the foresight to see where a road ends before you set foot on it. You find discretion, which is knowing what to say and, harder, what to leave unsaid. You find the man slow to anger and the man who rules his own spirit set above the soldier who takes a walled city. Every single piece of what the modern world has repackaged and priced as emotional intelligence is lying there in plain sight, named and praised and commanded, in a book so old its authors would find our excitement over the discovery a little quaint.¹

And here is what ought to sober us. It is not merely that the Bible got there first. It is that the Bible dug deeper than the seminar ever thought to dig. Strip the world’s emotional intelligence down to the frame and you find a set of skills in the service of the self. It will make you more effective, better liked, more persuasive, the sharpest operator in the room. Its aim, in the end, is you. Your advancement. Your outcomes. But the wisdom of Scripture leans toward an entirely different sun. It aims at the love of God and the love of your neighbor. It reins in your temper not so you can win the negotiation but so you can love the very person you are furious at. It teaches you to listen not so you can better position yourself but so you can get up under somebody else’s load and carry part of the weight. Same skills on the surface. Opposite masters underneath.

The world teaches you to manage people. Scripture teaches you to love them.

So when I say the world found a shadow, that is what I mean. It caught the outline of self-control and discernment and compassion, the shape of them thrown down on the ground, and catching even the shape is no small feat. But it missed the center. It missed the love. And it missed the power, the Spirit of God Himself, so it is left drilling people in techniques for imitating from the outside what was only ever meant to grow from the inside out. We have the thing itself. We have had it all along. Let us walk through it, a piece at a time, and quietly take our own property back down off the shelf.

chapter two

the message in transit

Let me tell you a story on myself, because it will teach the next several chapters better than any amount of explaining, and because I promised at the outset that I would not stand above the troubles I am describing. I have a full share of them. Here is one.

Not long ago I was in the house, and my father was in the house too, one room over, a few steps away. He had wanted a certain piece of information from me, and I had it, so I sent it along. By text. From inside the same house. Do not laugh too hard yet, we will come back to that. And because I was being efficient, I typed those three little letters everybody types, F, Y, I, meaning nothing on God’s green earth by them beyond here is that thing you asked for. That is all. For your information. Here it is. Not a barb anywhere in it, not the faintest edge, at least not in my own heart, and my own heart was the only vantage point I had.

But my father was not reading my heart. He was reading a screen, and a screen has no heart in it, no face, no tone of voice, and on that flat silent glass those three letters put on a completely different costume. He read them the way you would read them if a teenager planted a hand on her hip, rolled her eyes, and said, well, for your information. Snippy. Sassy. Disrespectful. He heard a whole attitude inside three letters that had no attitude in them anywhere, because the medium had stripped out everything that would have told him otherwise and left him to supply the tone himself, out of his own head. He supplied the wrong one.²

So he came out of his room, and he was hurt, and a little sharp about it. And here is where I have to be honest about myself, because up to this exact second nobody had sinned at all. His misreading was no sin; it was a dead medium doing what dead mediums do. My text was no sin; I had meant nothing by it. But now we stood face to face, and now there were two roads open to each of us every second, and this is precisely where sin finds its opening. He might have brought it to me gently, asked what I meant by it, extended the benefit of the doubt his own daughter had earned over a good many years. He came in hotter than that. And I, watching him come in hot over something I knew perfectly well I had not done, might have stayed soft, might have said, oh, no, I only meant here is the information, I am sorry it read that way. I did not stay as soft as I should have. I met a little heat with a little heat. Both of us had a hand on the same match.

It flared. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen, two people who genuinely love one another stood in a kitchen and misunderstood each other with real feeling, over three letters that had meant absolutely nothing. And then, because there was love underneath it and the Spirit of God in both of us, it cooled. Somebody drew a breath. The tone came down. I explained what I had actually meant, plainly, and he believed me, because once he was no longer hot he could see plainly that of course that was what I had meant, that his daughter had not been standing in the next room sassing him through a telephone. He was sorry he had come in hard. I was sorry I had answered hard. It was over. Fellowship was whole again. And honestly it is a little bit funny now, which is why I can afford to tell it on myself.

There is a ladder to how we speak to one another, and every rung down it costs you something. In person is the top rung, the full signal: words, face, eyes, tone, a hand on the shoulder, the whole living person standing right there to be read. The telephone is a rung down, and the face and the eyes are already gone; you have the voice, and thank God for the voice, it carries a great deal. Then text, at the bottom, where everything has been stripped away but the bare letters. No face, no voice, no tone. Just marks on glass with all the life pulled out of them, and a reader left to paint the tone back on out of whatever mood he happens to be carrying. Which is exactly how three innocent letters ended up in a costume they never owned. And it has never once been lost on me that I prefer the rung that fails the worst. I like to text. Texting is where the message corrupts most, because it carries the least of me across to you. There is a lesson in that I am still in the middle of learning.

chapter three

running on corrupt code

Now let us go underneath that kitchen and find out what was actually running the whole scene, because there is a diagnosis here the seminar will never hand you. The seminar takes it for granted that you are basically sound and simply short on technique. Scripture says something a great deal more serious, and a great deal more freeing once you stop fighting it. It says you are running on corrupt code.

I mean that nearly the way a programmer would. Picture inheriting an enormous piece of software with a fault written deep into its foundation, a corruption down in the source itself, so that no matter how carefully you use the thing, the fault keeps surfacing in odd places, throwing errors nobody asked for. You did not write the fault. It was there before the machine ever came to you. But it is yours now, and it runs through everything the machine does. That is the human heart after the Fall, and the Bible does not soften it.³

You are not a fine machine with a glitch. You are a corrupt one, being redeemed.

Watch what that does to our subject. If two people are just two neutral machines swapping information, then every breakdown between them is a technical problem with a technical fix, and the seminar has it right, and better tools will sort you out. But if two people are two corrupted systems, each running its own deep fault, each bent inward toward itself, quick to defend and slow to yield and marvelously skilled at reading its own motives as pure and the other fellow’s as suspect, then the friction between them is not a surface glitch at all. It is the natural, predictable output of the corruption. Of course they misread each other. Of course the smallest thing catches fire. They are two fallen creatures set close enough together to matter.

But now I have to draw a line straight down the middle of that wreckage, because everything ahead depends on it, and it is a line the church once knew well and has largely misplaced. There is sin, and there is the effect of sin, and they are not the same thing. Confusing them has heaped up more needless guilt and started more needless quarrels than nearly anything I know.

Take the simplest version, one nobody can argue with. A body wears out over the years, and that wearing out is no sin; it is an effect, the ordinary wear of a fallen world on an innocent creature, and there is no guilt anywhere in it. Now carry that into the space between two people. When my father heard sass inside three letters that had no sass in them, had he sinned? Not in the least. That was an effect, plain and simple, a dead medium and a tired mind together painting the wrong tone onto a silence. A misread text calls for repentance about as much as a wrinkle does. It was wreckage, not wickedness, the corrupt code coughing up an error neither of us had typed.

So what sorts the one from the other? Intent. The aim of the heart. That is the blade, and it cuts clean. A wound that arrives with no intent behind it, the accidental collision of two tired people at the end of a long day, the thing that landed wrong though it was thrown right, that is an effect, and it carries no guilt however much it stings going in. But a barb that was aimed, a thing said to cut, a word picked precisely because it would land on the soft spot, that is sin, and no amount of it is just how I am or I was only kidding will lift the guilt off it, because the heart knew exactly where it was aiming and God watched it aim. A joke built to wound is not rescued by stapling the word joke onto the end of it.

Feeling hurt proves you were hurt. It does not prove that sin was done to you.

And there is real mercy folded up inside this, and if you let it down into your bones it will free you in a hundred quarrels still to come. Feeling hurt does not prove that sin was done to you. It proves you were hurt, which is real and worth tending gently, but it tells you nothing whatever about which pile the hurt came from. We mix the two up constantly. We feel the sting and we leap in that same instant to a verdict: a sin was done to me, there is a villain in this room, somebody owes me. But so much of the sting in this life is effect and not sin, wreckage and not wickedness, the ordinary friction of two fallen people rather than an assault by an enemy. Only the heart of the one who spoke knows for certain which it was, and you are not standing inside that heart. So when you are hurt, the first and kindest question is not who sinned against me, but which is this, sin or effect? And most of the time you honestly cannot know. Love is what fills that gap, with the kindest reading the plain facts will bear.

chapter four

a two-way street

Here is the spine of everything that remains, and I want it standing upright now so the rest can hang on it. Talk between believers runs on a two-way street, with a real responsibility posted on each side of it, and nearly every modern conversation about this grabs one side and drops the other. We are going to pick up both and refuse to set either down, because Scripture holds both, and the health was always in the holding of both at once.

The first responsibility belongs to whoever is doing the talking, and it is real, and I will not let you wriggle loose of it, because the freedom I argue for elsewhere was never meant to become a license to fire away and then blame the hearer for flinching. We answer to Christ for what we say and how we say it. We are told to bridle the tongue, to let our speech hand grace to the people who hear it, to build up rather than tear down. And there is a reason this weighs so much among us in particular, deeper than mere politeness: we are meant to be identifying rightly to one another, representing Christ to each other in the very way we speak, so how I talk to my brother is a matter of personal accountability to God and not a trifle. A man does not get to say I meant nothing by it and wash his hands, if he was careless with a soul God told him to build.⁴

Now the other side of the street, the side the offended party would rather forget, and it binds just as tightly. Whoever is doing the listening carries a responsibility too, and it is the duty to interpret in love. This is where charity does some of its hardest and least-applauded labor. When a word lands on you and stings, love does not go leaping for the worst available reading. Love does the work. It asks: who is saying this to me? What do I actually know about this person? Is there a history of cruelty here, a pattern of aiming to wound? Or is this somebody who has shown me over years that they care about me and mean me well? Because if it is the latter, charity is bound to pause before it presses charges. Perhaps they were lashing out because something else in their life has gone wrong and I caught the spillover. Perhaps, likeliest of all, they meant nothing by it whatsoever, and this was simple miscommunication, the corrupt code throwing an error, nobody’s fault, an effect and not a sin. The loving hearer extends the benefit of the doubt that the speaker’s track record has already earned. That is not naivety. It is obedience.⁵

The speaker answers for his words. The hearer answers for his reading. Carry both.

There is the two-way street, whole and entire. The speaker weighs his words, because he answers to God for the soul standing on the other end of them. The hearer weighs his reading, because he answers to God for the charity he hands over or holds back. Grab only the first and you build a walking-on-eggshells world where every wounded feeling becomes a courtroom and whoever spoke is automatically guilty. Grab only the second and you build a callous world where anybody may say any cruel thing he pleases and the wounded are told to grow a thicker skin. Scripture will not let you pick one. It puts both in your hands, one apiece, and tells you to carry them the whole length of every conversation you will ever have. And let me say this quietly, because it is the beating heart of the booklet: we never needed the world to teach us any of this. It was ours before the world had a word for it.

chapter five

swift to hear, slow to wrath

So how is that two-way street actually walked? The Holy Spirit answered that question a long time ago, in the right order, inside one short verse, ages before anybody thought to charge admission for it.

Look at the order, because the order is the wisdom. Swift to hear stands first. Slow to speak stands second. Slow to wrath stands third. They are sequenced that way because they cause one another in exactly that direction. A man genuinely swift to hear, who leans in to understand before he answers, will find himself naturally slow to speak, since real listening fills the space a quick retort would have leapt into. And a man slow to speak, who lets one breath pass before he answers, will find himself slow to wrath, because most of our wrath gets fired inside that first hot half-second, and a man trained not to speak in that half-second has usually not caught fire by the time he does.⁶

Both sides of the street are sitting right there in that one verse, and that is why I have put them in a single chapter rather than pretending they are two lessons. Swift to hear is the listener’s discipline. Remember, he is bound to interpret in love, to weigh who is speaking and what they likely meant before he reaches any verdict, and he cannot possibly do that if he is not actually listening. The rush to speak and the rush to wrath grow from one root: a heart more interested in its own case than in the person standing there, already drafting its defense instead of receiving the human being in front of it. Swift to hear is the cure at the root. It is the humility to allow that you may not yet have the whole picture, that three letters might mean something other than what your mood is painting on them.

And slow to wrath is the speaker’s discipline, the governing of your own spirit, which the world now sells under the name self-regulation. What it points at is the power to feel a thing hard without being driven by it, to carry anger without becoming anger, to leave your hand off the match even when the match lies right there and striking it would feel so good. Scripture ranked that skill long ago, and ranked it startlingly high.

Feel the size of that comparison, because it is deliberate. The man who conquers a walled city, the general, the one they raise the statue to, is the smaller man. The greater one is whoever governs his own temper in a kitchen while being wrongly accused. God ranks the inner conquest over the outer one, flatly, and He means it. And self-control comes last in the list of the Spirit’s fruit not because it matters least but because it stands guard over all the others, keeping love and patience and kindness from being swept off the table the moment the blood comes up.

The anger is weather. The governing is the work. Be angry, and sin not.

But hear the crucial thing, the piece the world’s version keeps getting wrong, because it will free you from a false guilt. Ruling your spirit does not mean not feeling. It is not the flattening of a man into some grey calm where nothing moves him. Scripture never says do not be angry. It says something wiser and far more livable: be ye angry, and sin not, and let not the sun go down upon your wrath. The anger itself is not the sin. The flare is human, the corrupt code, body and blood firing before the will has even arrived to see what happened. What God puts under command is what you do with the flare once it is lit, whether you govern it or hand it the wheel, whether you let the sun go down on it and let it harden overnight into a petted grudge. Look back at my kitchen. The flare of feeling when my father came through the door hot was not my sin. Meeting his heat with my own instead of governing myself, that was where I stepped across the line. The feeling was weather, and weather is not a moral act. The governing was the work. Had he been slow to speak for one more breath, and had I been swift to hear him rather than swift to defend myself, there would have been no flare at all. The verse was sitting there the whole time. It usually is.

chapter six

weep with those who weep

Empathy is the fashionable word for it now, and the fashion treats it as a temperament, something a few soft-hearted souls are born holding and the rest are born without, so that if you are one of the rest you get a quiet pass. Scripture hands out no such pass. It never once files the entering of another person’s sorrow under personality, under the luck of your wiring. It files it under command, addressed to every believer alike, and a command does not knock at the door of your temperament. It knocks at the door of your will.

It is set down as plainly as the order to feed the hungry. Weep with them that weep. Go stand inside somebody else’s grief, let it be real to you, let it move you, whether or not you feel naturally inclined, because your brother is down in the pit and love climbs down into pits. This is compassion conscripted, made a duty of love rather than a gift of disposition, and it is sturdier than the world’s version for exactly that reason: a command can be obeyed on the days you do not feel it, and the people in the pit need you most on precisely those days.

But I have to set a firm guardrail here, because this is the spot where tender-hearted believers run off the road, and I have watched it happen and I have done it myself. To weep with those who weep is not the same as to fix those who weep. The two get confused constantly and the confusion does real damage. You are commanded to be present. You are commanded to come down into the grief, to listen, to comfort, to sit in the ashes beside your friend the way Job’s companions did during their one good week, before they opened their mouths and ruined everything. You are not commanded to solve anybody. You cannot reach into another soul and repair it. And when you try, when you go rushing past the weeping to get to the fixing, with your bright advice and your five steps and your there-now-cheer-up, you are very often not loving that person at all. You are soothing your own discomfort at their pain. They can always tell.

You are commanded to be present, not to fix. You are not the Holy Spirit.

Agape, the love the New Testament actually commands, was never a feeling to begin with. That is the world’s whole confusion, that love is some warm sensation that comes over a person. Biblical love is a set of the will. It acts. It shows up. It does the deed. It stays in the room when staying is unbearable and holds its tongue when there is nothing worth saying. It is, if I may put it bluntly, a put-up-or-shut-up love, proven by what it does and never once by what it feels. So when your friend is broken, do not perform compassion at him, and do not come charging in to repair him, and above all do not vanish, silent and absent, because you could not find the words. Show up. Sit down. Weep if you can weep, and be quiet if you cannot, and let your steady, useless, faithful presence preach the whole gospel to him without a word in it. When God Himself came down to us, He came first as Immanuel, which does not mean God who solves us. It means God with us. And He stood and wept at a grave He was three minutes from opening.

chapter seven

own your half, and restore

Let us take my kitchen apart the rest of the way, because one more lesson is buried in it, and it may be the one that actually mends your quarrels if you will practice it. When the flare had come and gone and the two of us stood there in the cooling air, a question hung in the room, the same question that hangs in every room after every quarrel. Whose fault was that? And the honest answer, the one that actually heals, is almost never the answer we want, because the answer we want is his.

It takes two to tango. In very nearly every conflict that catches fire between two believers there is a share belonging to each of them, and the shares are rarely even, and they do not have to be even to both be real. My father came in hotter than a loving question would have come; that was his share, genuinely his. I met his heat with heat instead of the soft answer that turns away wrath; that was my share, genuinely mine. And here is what I could not say to myself in the heat but had to say afterward: his share is not mine to collect, and my share is not excused by his. I do not get to point at how he came through the door as though that disarmed my own responsibility to answer well. Nobody made me answer hot. He supplied the provocation. I supplied the sin.⁷

He supplied the provocation. I supplied the sin. Those have two different owners.

This is the death of the favorite lie of every quarrel ever fought, which is he made me. He did not make you. Nobody makes you sin. The provocation was real and it was his, but the response came up out of your own heart, and if the response was sin then the sin was yours and nobody else’s, no matter how generously he supplied the occasion. I know that sounds like bad news at first, as though somebody just confiscated your best excuse, and that is exactly what has happened. But it is a doorway. A sin that is genuinely yours is a sin you can genuinely repent of and be genuinely finished with, washed clean, while a sin you have carefully pinned on somebody else will hold you in its jail for years, waiting on an apology that may never come. So own your half. Just your half, mind you, not his; you are not required to shoulder his and could not repent it for him if you tried. But own your half all the way, name it out loud, take it to God and take it to the person. You will find again and again that owning your half is the very key that springs the other man’s grip on his, because it is astonishingly hard to keep defending your corner against somebody who has already walked out of his.

And now the aim of the whole thing, which the flesh will try to swap out for a counterfeit the moment your back is turned. When a conflict is on, the flesh wants to win. It wants the other person to admit he was wrong, to fold, to concede the field, to sign the confession in front of witnesses. It wants the victory. But victory is the wrong goal from the start. A man can win every argument he ever walks into and stand at the end of his life in the rubble of every relationship he ever had, correct the whole way down and entirely alone. The goal was never to win. The goal was to be restored to your brother, and more often than you would think, those two point in opposite directions.

Restore. That is the word, and it is borrowed from the setting of a broken bone and the mending of a torn net, a word about making whole again what was fractured, about repair and return, never about triumph. So when you go to your brother after a quarrel, or he comes to you, the question in your heart is not how do I win this but how do we come back together, how does this fracture get set so the bone bears weight again. And notice the strange humility built right into the errand: even while you go to restore the one at fault, you are to consider yourself, lest you also be tempted, keeping one eye on your own corrupt code the entire time you are tending somebody else’s. You are not the surgeon standing over the patient. You are one patient helping another, and next week the roles may well reverse.⁸

So how is it done? The way my kitchen was mended, and the steps are always the same. The heat is allowed to cool first, because nothing true gets said while the blood is up, and a wise believer will sometimes say let us both take a breath and come back to this, which is not avoidance but wisdom. Then the genuine thing is spoken and believed: I explained what I had truly meant, and he chose to believe me, which is the hearer’s charity in action, taking an honest word at face value from a person whose heart he had every reason to trust. Then each owns his own half and not the other’s, and neither makes his own sorrow conditional on the other going first. And then fellowship is declared whole and actually treated as whole, the matter not filed away for later use, not hauled back out as ammunition next month, but forgiven, which means released, let go, dropped into the same sea God drops our own sins into and remembers no more. Forgiven, not merely paused. That is restoration, and it is the entire goal, and everything else in this booklet has only ever been in service of it: that two people running corrupt code, who wounded each other because that is what corrupt code does, should be made whole again and go on together in love. Win less. Restore more.

chapter eight

living for god and not for men

There is one last thing, My Friend, and it is what finally cuts a person loose from the tyranny of other people’s words. I saved it for the end on purpose, because you are not ready for it until you have done all the rest first. Here it is. When everything is said and done, there is only one voice whose verdict on you finally counts, and it is not the voice of the man who misread your text. It is not the voice of the person who wounded you. It is not even your own anxious voice, lying awake at night, rehearsing what they must all be thinking of you. It is the voice of God. And when you have truly learned to live for His hearing, the words of men quietly lose the power to rule you that they never had any right to in the first place.

Now do not mistake me here, because the two-way street forbids me to say the thing the flesh would love to hear. Living for God and not for men does not mean other people’s words stop mattering, that you may now be careless of everybody because you answer to God alone. That is the callous ditch, and we ruled it out several chapters back. You are still bound to the speaker’s side of the street, still accountable to build up rather than tear down, and living for God is the very thing that obligates you there, since it was God who told you to love them. What it does mean is something better. It means that when you have done your part, when you have spoken with grace and owned your half and read others in love and sought peace as far as it lay in you, then the leftover sting, the word that was unfair, the reading that was uncharitable, the apology that never came, may be laid down at the feet of the only Judge who counts. You do not have to carry it any further than that.⁹

And I will tell you one small true thing about maturity, from the far side of a good many of these quarrels. It never stops hurting entirely, and anybody who promises you otherwise is selling something. A word aimed at you, or even a word not aimed at you that simply lands wrong, can still sting a seasoned saint. We do not turn to stone, and we were never meant to. But it rolls off more, further along the road. It stays a shorter while. It goes in less deep and leaves less residue, and not because you have grown a thicker hide. Because you have grown a surer anchor. Your sense of who you are has quietly migrated off the shifting ground of what people say about you and onto the fixed ground of what God has already said about you: that you are His, bought, beloved, and safe. And a soul anchored there can afford to be generous with the words of men. It can afford the benefit of the doubt. It can afford to absorb a wound without needing to hand one back, precisely because none of those words can reach the one thing that actually holds him. So let the words of men roll, more and more as you go. Live for the audience of One. He has already spoken over you the only word that finally decides anything, and it was a good word, and it is not going to change.