Known Is The Half Nobody Quotes

Small living room, two lamps on, rain doing the thing rain does on that window, and four of them playing a board game that one of them takes far more seriously than the others.

She is thirty-three.

Six years, and here is the specific trouble, and it is not the one people assume.

She is explained wrongly by everybody. Not maliciously. Everybody who loves her has built a version of her, and every version is slightly off, and all of them are confident.

Her mother thinks she is braver than she is. Her closest friend thinks she is angrier than she is. A woman at church thinks she has made a kind of peace with it, and says so, warmly, to other people. Her sister thinks she is in denial. Her employer thinks she is coping and does not know about the mornings.

Not one of these people is a fool and not one of them is unkind. They have each taken the fragments they get and made a person out of them, which is what everybody does with everybody, and it works fine for people whose lives are visible.

Hers is not visible. So the fragments are wrong, and the people built out of them are wrong, and she has stopped correcting because there are five of them and one of her and no version she offers stays fixed for longer than a month.

If you are explained wrongly by everybody, you know it is nobody's fault, and you know you have stopped trying to be understood accurately by anyone.

Read the second half of the verse

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the six years. It is the accuracy. It costs you the ordinary experience of being roughly correctly understood by the people closest to you, which almost everybody has without thinking about it. It costs you the corrections, which you have given up making because there is one of you and five of them. It costs the room, a little, because you are in it as a person nobody is quite describing. And it costs you a version of yourself that lives in other people's mouths and that you cannot reach.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your six years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if being unknown has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking nobody would be losing the person they think you are, tell one living person today. Your doctor, whichever of the four takes the game least seriously, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who show up with a board game on a wet night.

Now, 1 Corinthians 13, and read the whole verse, because the half everybody quotes is the first one.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.1 Corinthians 13:12

Then shall I know even as also I am known.

The first half is about seeing and everybody has heard it. The second half is about being known, and it is in the present tense, and almost nobody notices.

As also I am known. Not shall be known. Am. Paul is saying that there already exists a knowing of him that is complete, and it is the standard he is measuring the future against, and it is happening now.

You are already known in full by somebody, and it is the present tense in the verse. First Corinthians 13:12 puts the being known in the present, and the Holy Spirit is the one Paul says searches even the deep things.

Now, what that does to five confident versions of you. Every one of them is a partial account made honestly out of partial evidence, and every one of them is wrong, and you cannot correct them and you have stopped trying.

The verse does not promise that they will get better at it. It says something else: that alongside all of those, there is a full one, and it is current, and its accuracy does not depend on the fragments anybody has.

You have an accurate account of yourself in existence and it was never assembled from fragments. That is written into 1 Corinthians 13:12, and His Spirit in you is the one who searches all things, including the parts nobody in that room can see.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because six years of confident descriptions have already been made about you.

It does not promise that anybody will understand you correctly. Not your mother, not your sister, not the woman at church, and I am not going to predict a conversation, because I do not know.

And it does not make the being known a reward. There is nothing in that verse about having earned it or having been patient enough for it. First Corinthians 13:12 states it as a fact already the case, in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit does not measure it against anything you have done.

And it does not tell you your people are failing you. They are doing the ordinary human thing with the ordinary human evidence, and this site is not going to prosecute a family for not being able to see inside somebody.

You were never required to be understood in order to be known. Scripture puts the being known in the present tense, and the same Spirit who searches the deep things is the one who carries that into a small room with the rain on the window.