The People in Your Life

You are thinking about someone right now. You have been thinking about them since the first chapter. The book gave you the vocabulary to think about it more clearly, but the question was already there before the book began.

The question is not whether they are a good person. The question is not whether their external life has been more or less consistent with Christian virtue. The question is whether the relational knowing of John 17:3 is present. And you probably do not know the answer with certainty, because the knowing is not an external observable. What you can observe are the signs that tend to accompany it — the poverty of spirit, the orientation toward God rather than toward the performance of adequacy, the genuine rather than the performed version of the things the faith produces.

What the map gives you is not a tool for sorting the people in your life into categories. It gives you a reason to care about the question and a reason to raise it — not as a threat, not as a debate, but as the most important question that can be asked about any person, because the outcome the question bears on is permanent.

The Socratic method that ran through the middle chapters of this book — the method of identifying load-bearing assumptions and examining them before arguing about their conclusions — is the right method for this conversation too. Not "do you believe the right things," which is a question about the resume. Not "have you said the prayer," which is a question about the transaction. The question is: do you know Him? And if the honest answer is uncertain — if the person you are thinking about, or the person reading this, is not sure whether what they have is the real thing or the surface version — then the uncertainty itself is the door.

Uncertainty about whether the knowing is real is not the same as the absence of it. But it is a reason to attend to the question rather than defer it. The empty hands are the right hands for the question. The person who is not sure whether they have enough is in exactly the posture that Matthew 5:3 describes. The kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit. Not to the sufficient. Not to the certain about their own sufficiency. To the poor.