The Argument I Win Every Morning

Micah Freitas has won the same argument every morning for six years, and he has never once had it.

It happens in the shower, between the shampoo and the second time he turns the water hotter. It has a shape now. Reuben opens the way Reuben opens, with that little flat thing he does with his hand, and Micah has the first answer ready, and Reuben comes back, and Micah has that one covered too. There is a branch two thirds of the way through where Reuben could go one of two ways, and Micah has both.

And then there is the closing line.

The closing line is genuinely excellent. Micah has laughed out loud at it. It is not cruel, and that is the thing he is proudest of. It is not cruel and it is not loud, and it ends the whole matter so completely that in the version in his head Reuben just sits there.

Reuben is married to Micah's sister. Fourteen years. He is at every birthday, every graduation, every Sunday when there is food.

I am not going to tell you what the disagreement is about.

Not because it is delicate. Because it does not matter, and because you have already filled it in with yours, and that tells you everything you need to know about how this works.

At the actual gatherings, Micah is a model of good behavior. He hands Reuben a plate. He asks about the job. He laughs at the thing about the dog. He does not engage, ever, and somewhere in year three he started calling that peace and feeling quietly good about it, the way you feel about a thing you have decided is a virtue.

Then his sister's van dropped its transmission on the way home from a birthday at the beach park, and Micah and Reuben ended up on the shoulder of the highway with a flashlight, in the dark, with everybody else in the other car and gone.

Forty minutes. Two men and one flashlight.

Fifteen minutes in, with both of Micah's hands up inside the engine bay and a bolt held between his teeth, Reuben started talking. Micah heard the shape of it and knew where it was going, and the first answer came up his throat and had nowhere to go, because of the bolt.

So he had to hear the second clause. Then the third.

And at about the fifth clause Reuben said something that was not in the script at all. It was small. It was about his own father and a thing that happened when Reuben was eleven, and he said it sideways, the way people say the real thing, in the middle of a sentence about something else.

The shower version of Reuben had never once said that. It could not have. Micah built the shower version out of a man he had already decided about, and he had only ever given him the lines Micah could beat.

Micah took the bolt out of his mouth.

He did not use the closing line.

He said, "Huh." And then, after a second, "When was that?"

And Reuben told him. And Micah asked one more thing, and Reuben answered that too, and then the socket slipped and they both said something they should not have, and by then it had stopped being a conversation about anything.

They got the van rolling at twenty to ten. Neither man had changed his mind about anything. It ended in the middle, in the dark, with a bad seal still leaking and a long tow ahead of them.

Micah got in the shower the next morning and the argument would not start. Not because he had won it. Because the man in it had said something the script did not have, and you cannot run a script with a real person in it.

Answering before you have heard

There is a line in Proverbs most of us hear as a rule about manners, and it is not about manners at all.

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.Proverbs 18:13

Read what wisdom calls folly there. It is not being wrong. It is being early.

You can be entirely right about a matter and still be inside that verse, because the verse is not measuring your conclusion. It is measuring whether the thing you answered was the thing that was actually said.

Six years of running it every morning is six years of answering a matter before hearing it, in advance, on a schedule. And you win every single time, and the reason has nothing to do with whether you are right. You win because you are writing both sides. You gave him his lines, and you gave him the ones you had answers for.

So hear this over you, and hear it as relief and not as accusation: your conviction never needed the version you built. What you actually believe can stand up in a room with the real man in it. That is not my confidence in your argument, which I have not read. It is written that wisdom is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, and the Holy Spirit who authored that sentence is not asking you to become less sure. He is offering to make you unafraid.

Now the thing nobody says out loud. You did not build that argument out of pride, and almost nobody does. You built it because a real conversation went badly once and you got caught without an answer, and you stood there afterward with your face hot, thinking of the three things you should have said. And you decided, somewhere below the level of deciding anything, never to be caught out again.

That is not arrogance. That is a person who got hurt and made a plan.

And the plan is off you. You are not required to have an answer ready before a person opens their mouth, and you never were. The written word puts the burden on hearing, not on rebutting: swift to hear, slow to speak. And the Spirit of God is the one who gives a word in the hour it is needed, which is precisely why you are not the one who has to have it stockpiled.

And the latch is on your side, which means the door has been yours to leave open the whole time. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and notice how carefully God worded the limit of your responsibility there. As much as lieth in you. Not their part. Yours. And the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to hold their full weight on something and keep their hands open at the same time.

Now let me stop saying he, because the man laughing at his own closing line under the hot water is you.

You know the branch two thirds of the way through. You know the little thing they do with their hand. You have been unfailingly polite at every gathering for years and somewhere along the way you started to feel good about it, and underneath that is something which is not peace, because peace does not need to be rehearsed at six in the morning.

And the person you have been arguing with is not in the room. They never were. The word says a false witness speaketh lies, and a version of a person that you wrote yourself is testimony nobody gave. The Spirit of truth has been standing beside you in that steam every morning, and He has never once agreed to play the other part.