I Am In The Bottom Quartile

You opened it four times.

Same chart. Same numbers. Nothing had changed between the first time and the fourth time and you knew that while you were doing it.

Half past nine. Twenty past ten. Some time after eleven. And once more in the dark, which is the one that bothers you.

You are in the bottom quartile. That is the phrase, and it is not even an insult; it is a normal statistical description of where a set of figures sits relative to two hundred other sets of figures.

But it has become the answer to a different question.

Somebody asked you last week how things were going and you heard yourself say, in a light voice, that you are not exactly setting the world on fire.

That was the chart answering. You did not decide to say it.

And here is what has actually got hold of you, which is not the ranking.

It is that you have started ranking everything. The way you handled a difficult conversation on Tuesday. The state of the back room. How you look. Your own children, once, for about four seconds, which frightened you.

Something has been switched on and it does not have an off.

There is a verse about comparison that is more blunt than most people expect.

Comparing themselves among themselves

Paul is describing certain people and makes a judgment about the practice they are engaged in.

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

Are not wise. That is the verdict, and it is not a moral one.

He does not say comparison is wicked. He says it is unwise, which is a word about whether a thing works, and about whether a person doing it is going to end up somewhere good.

You have been doing something the written word calls unwise rather than something it calls sinful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says it that plainly. 2 Corinthians 10:12 puts the whole matter in the category of what does not work, and He said it without any condemnation attached.

That distinction takes weight off immediately, because you have been half expecting to be told off.

There is nothing to be told off about. There is a mechanism running that produces bad information, and it needs turning off, and that is a different kind of problem entirely.

You are dealing with a faulty instrument rather than a moral failure, and it is written that measuring by one another is simply not wise. The Spirit of God is the one who is honest about which of those a thing is, and 2 Corinthians 10 is where He calls it.

Now look at the mechanism itself, because Paul describes it exactly.

Measuring themselves by themselves. Comparing themselves among themselves. It is a closed loop. There is nothing outside the group in the whole operation.

Two hundred and eleven rows compared to each other produces a ranking and nothing else. It cannot produce a value, because value would require something from outside the set, and there is nothing outside the set in that document.

You have been asking a closed loop a question it cannot answer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stands outside the set entirely. Scripture names the closedness as the exact fault in it, and 2 Corinthians 10:12 is where the problem with the inside gets named.

The switch that will not turn off

Let me deal with the part that frightened you, because it is important and it is not what you think.

Ranking your own children for four seconds does not mean something has gone wrong with you as a mother. It means a habit that got trained on a chart has generalized, which is what habits do.

Anything practiced four times a night for a year will show up in places nobody invited it.

That is not a character defect. It is repetition, and repetition can be interrupted the same way it was built.

You are not becoming a person who ranks her own children, and the written word calls comparison unwise rather than making it a verdict on the comparer. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman the difference between a habit and a heart, and He is not vague about it.

And the practical part is smaller than you would guess.

The chart is not the problem. Reading it once a month is information. Reading it four times in one evening is not information; it is something else wearing information's clothes.

The second read produces nothing. The third and fourth produce less than nothing, because by then a woman is not reading a document, she is looking for something in it, and it is never in there.

You have been going back for something that was never in the columns, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been standing beside every one of those four reads. It is written that this kind of measuring is not wise, and 2 Corinthians 10 says why they never helped.

Close it and put it in another room

So here is the thing to do, and it is tonight, and it is physical.

Close the chart. Then take the device it lives on and put it in a different room from the one you sleep in.

Then go to bed and do not open it again.

You are interrupting a habit rather than winning an argument with a document, and 2 Corinthians 10:12 calls the whole practice unwise rather than sinful. The Spirit of God is the one who does something in the space that opens up, and He does not need it filled.

The reason it has to be another room is that resolve does not survive eleven o'clock. A decision made at nine in a lit kitchen has no authority over a woman lying in the dark with a device on the nightstand.

Distance works where willpower does not. That is not a weakness; that is how everybody is built.

You have permission to make it physically harder rather than to try harder, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person through the first four nights. The written word never once asked anybody to win by sheer effort, and 2 Corinthians 10 is where the practice gets named for what it is.

Then get up in the morning and go and open at the usual time, and the chart says exactly what it said.