For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. We are glad whenever we are weak but you are strong; and our prayer is that you may be fully restored.
2 Corinthians 13:8-9 (NIV)
Glad to Be Weak
Three years since the partnership came apart, and she is right about it. She has the emails, in a folder, and she could put them on a table in front of anybody and be finished inside ten minutes.
What would end it is a phone call that doesn’t mention them. She has drafted the message twice without that paragraph in it, and looked at it, and not sent it, and not deleted it either. He is somewhere doing a version of the same thing, and neither of them will move first, and the third year has gone by the way the second one did.
Things had gone wrong between Paul and the church at Corinth. He’s writing ahead of a visit, hoping he won’t have to be harsh with them when he comes, and he’s already braced for them to read the whole business as his failure. His answer is that he can’t do anything against the truth, only for it. Whatever turns out to be true, he’s on that side of it, including the version where he’s the one who looks like he failed.
He goes further than that. We are glad whenever we are weak but you are strong. If the choice is between being proven right about himself and having these people come out whole, he wants them whole, and he says what he’s praying for them: that you may be fully restored. He’d rather they never needed correcting at all, even if that leaves him looking like a man whose warnings amounted to nothing.
She is not glad about any of this. That is the distance between her and the man who wrote the letter, and it is worth measuring rather than talking around. Paul is glad, and he says so, and what he is glad about is looking like the failure if they come out whole. He wanted these people mended more than he wanted their respect, and once the wanting runs in that order, looking weak in front of them stops being the thing he has to prevent.
Being right about the facts is not in question here, and it was not in question at Corinth either. Paul had the facts. What he would not do was spend them.
The folder is still in the drawer. The draft is still in the app, two paragraphs long instead of three.
A Prayer to Remember
You came after me while I was still in the wrong, and you came yourself. Do that with the person I keep rehearsing arguments against. Mend what’s torn there. If being right about them is the price of it, I’d rather pay that than hold the line another year.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
