I Win The Argument The Same Way

He does not raise his voice and he does not interrupt and he has never once said anything cruel, and that is exactly what makes it so effective.

What he does is wait.

He lets the other person finish. He lets them finish completely, past the point where they have said the strong version and started saying the loose version, because everybody, in the last ten percent of what they are saying, says something slightly wider than they meant. A never. An always. A nobody in this family.

And then he asks about that.

Not aggressively. Genuinely, in a level voice, with real interest. Nobody in this family? And there is a pause, and the other person has to either defend a thing they did not mean or take it back, and either way the shape of the conversation has changed and the original point is now four rooms away and nobody will ever get back to it.

He learned it at about fourteen. He would tell you the exact table.

He has used it on his wife perhaps two dozen times in nineteen years and she has never once named it, and he is not sure whether that is because she cannot see it or because she has decided not to say.

He has used it on his eldest twice, and both times he knew within about a minute and both times he did not undo it.

He is fifty-two. He is respected, and the respect is earned, and people bring him difficult things because he is genuinely good at difficult things.

And there is a thing he does after he wins, which is that he feels the room get colder by about one degree, and everybody moves on pleasantly, and later, sometimes hours later, he sits somewhere and thinks: I did the thing again, and nobody will ever mention it, and that is the trouble.

Nobody is taking your mind off you

Let me say what is not happening on this page, because I think you have already worked out where it is going and you have started, mildly, to defend.

Nobody is asking you to be less able. The waiting, the listening past the strong version, the noticing of the loose word: those are not vices. Half the people in the world would be better off if they could do a quarter of it, and you use it for good in about nine settings a week and people bring you their difficult things for a reason.

The mind is not the problem. It is the fastest and best-furnished thing about you and God gave it to you.

What we are talking about is where it goes when a conversation gets close to something.

Because that is the pattern, is it not. It does not come out at work, where you are argued with constantly and enjoy it. It comes out at a table. With your wife, with your eldest, in the exact rooms where a man is most likely to be shown something about himself.

And here is what has actually been done in you.

And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.Colossians 3:10

I want you to notice the phrase renewed in knowledge, because it is the one that ought to interest a man like you.

Paul does not say the new man is renewed in spite of knowledge, or that the mind is bypassed, or that a clever man has to become a simpler one to be any use to God. He says the renewing happens in knowledge. The faculty is not confiscated. It is remade, in the image of the One who made it.

You have put on a new man who is being renewed in exactly the faculty you are best at, and that is not a consolation for a man with a sharp tongue, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the one degree of cold rather than on your reading of Colossians.

Now let me say the honest thing about the move itself.

It is not an argument. That is what has been bothering you for years without your ever putting it in words. A real argument engages the strong version of what somebody said. Your move engages the weakest version, on purpose, at the moment they are least defended, and it works precisely because it looks like fairness.

You know that. You have known it since about fourteen. You are not a man who has been getting away with something he did not notice. The word says the new man is renewed in knowledge, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been making that one degree of cold register in you hours later, in a chair, on your own.

That registering is not guilt. It is the renewing happening in the very faculty you are being tempted to use badly.

I want to say something about the two times with your eldest.

You knew within a minute and you did not undo it. You have been given an accurate conscience about this and it works fast, and Scripture puts the new man's renewal in the mind, and the Spirit is the one who fires it, and a man who knows within sixty seconds is a man in whom something is already working.

And here is the last of it. You are not a man with a weapon he cannot put down. The word says renewed, present and ongoing, after the image of the One who created him, and the mind that learned a move at fourteen at a table is the same mind God is remaking, and He is doing it without taking one thing away from you.