The Toast at the Reunion

It happens after the food and before the coffee, and it has happened every year for as long as anybody can remember, and it is not organized, it just happens.

Somebody stands up. This year it was an uncle. And the toast is to Marco, who is doing very well, and who has done very well for about fifteen years now, and who is genuinely a good man and who paid for the tent this year and did not want that mentioned and it got mentioned anyway.

Twenty eight people raise a glass. He raises his. He likes Marco.

Here is a list of things that have not been toasted, and I am setting it down not because it should have been, but because a person is allowed to have an accurate picture of their own life.

The two years their grandmother lived with him and his wife. The month he took off unpaid when his sister's marriage came apart. The nephew who lived in their spare room for eleven months at seventeen, which nobody in the family knows the real reason for, and which is the single most consequential thing he has ever done for anybody, and which cannot be mentioned because the nephew is sitting four seats down and is now twenty four and is fine.

That last one is the thing. It cannot be said. Not this year, not in ten years. The whole value of it depends on it not being said.

So he raises his glass, and he means it, and there is nothing wrong with the toast, and every year at about that moment a specific thought arrives and he is tired of it arriving.

The thought is not that he should be toasted. He would hate to be toasted. The thought is smaller and it goes: if this table made a list of who has done the most for this family, where would I be on it. And then the answer he gives himself, and then the immediate embarrassment of having run the exercise at all.

You will have your own toast. The annual moment when a table makes a shape and you find yourself checking where you are in it.

The one time Paul calls something stupid

There is a line in Corinthians where Paul is defending himself against people who have been comparing him unfavorably with other teachers, and he says something that reads almost as a joke.

Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding.2 Corinthians 10:12

Without understanding. Some translations put it more bluntly. Paul is not saying comparison is unkind, and he is not saying it is proud. He is saying it is unintelligent. It does not work. It is the wrong tool, in the way that a ruler is the wrong tool for weighing something.

And look at why. When they measure themselves by one another. There is no fixed unit anywhere in that sentence. Each person is being measured against something that is itself only measured against something else, and nothing in the system is anchored to anything, which means the whole apparatus can produce any answer at all depending on where you start.

So take it plainly: you are not measurable on the instrument that table uses, and that is what 2 Corinthians 10 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an argument about traveling preachers and lays it on a long table under trees.

Which is why the exercise he runs every year cannot be completed. He thinks the problem is that his contributions are invisible and Marco's are visible. The real problem is more basic than that. There is no list. Not a hidden list he is low on. No list, and the thing he is trying to do at the end of every reunion is arithmetic on a set that does not exist.

And notice Paul does not tell them to compare more fairly, or to include the hidden contributions. He tells them the operation itself is a failure of understanding. He does not fix the measurement. He puts down the ruler.

You have been running an operation that has no answer in it, because the written word calls that measuring a lack of understanding rather than a lack of humility, and His Spirit is what makes that land on a man who is tired of the thought arriving.

Marco has not taken anything

Now the guardrail, and it matters here.

Marco is not the problem in this story. He has done very well, and he paid for the tent, and he did not want that said, and he is a good man, and none of the toast was inaccurate. There is nothing in this article that requires Marco to be quietly diminished for it to be true.

And the man with the glass is not the more faithful of the two. That sentence is not available. Two years with a grandmother does not outrank fifteen years of doing well and paying for tents, and eleven months with a nephew is not a trump card, and the entire concept of a trump card is what Paul has just called a failure of understanding.

If this article leaves anybody sitting slightly straighter as the one who really carried it, then something has gone wrong, because that is the same ruler, held the other way up.

So: you have nothing to win at that table and nothing that anybody took, because a crown in Scripture is placed on a head and never earned, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

And the nephew stays unsaid. That is not a loss to be borne. You are holding something that is only what it is because it stays unsaid, and Scripture is what keeps that from being a sacrifice nobody noticed, and His Spirit is what makes silence restful rather than costly.