Truth in Love

After a dinner party, two people are cleaning up the kitchen. One of them said the hard thing at the table, in front of everybody, and is now stacking plates and explaining that somebody had to say it. The other has not said the hard thing for four years. She is drying dishes, and she says nothing about that either.

The phrase "speaking the truth in love" reaches both of them from opposite sides, because each has taken half of it and called that half a virtue. Start with the one stacking plates. Later in this chapter Paul puts a firm fence around our words: "Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers." The test is whether grace reached the person who heard it, and the speaker does not get to grade that test.

Now turn to the one drying dishes. Leviticus forbids hating your brother in your heart, and in the same verse it commands, "thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him." That puts four years of silence in a place she would never have put it herself. Proverbs makes the same point from the other side: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful."

Paul's verse gives both of them one place to go: "may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ." The very next verse pictures the whole body "fitly joined together," so neither of them gets there alone. Christ is the One they are both growing toward, and He is the One who holds the two halves together. By now you have probably seen yourself in one of the two. Someone like the other was at the same table, and is likely still in your life. So go and tell them which half of the sentence you keep dropping, and then let them tell you what the missing half would have sounded like.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 5 is Drawn (Jeremiah 31:3).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two