The Weight That Is Not the Whole Weight

A man said it to her in the doorway of a hall and he was not being unkind, and it took the top off her anyway.

Light affliction. He said it exactly like that, with a small smile, quoting, and he put his hand briefly on her arm as he said it, and then somebody called him and he went.

She stood in the doorway for a while.

Because of what is in her house at the moment, which is not going in this article and which she has told about four people, and none of them were him.

Light. She has carried it for two years and there are mornings she has to sit down on the edge of the bed for ten minutes before she can start, and the word for that in her actual life is not light and it never has been, and she has begun to feel that Scripture itself is on the other side of the room from her.

That is the part that frightens her. Not the man. She has forgotten the man. What has stayed is the sense that the verse he quoted is a verse that describes her situation as small, and that if she cannot agree with it then she is arguing with the Bible.

Read the whole comparison

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians 4:17).

That verse has two weights in it and almost everybody quotes only one.

Light affliction, which is the phrase that gets said in doorways. And then: a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, which is the other side of the sentence and is the whole reason the first half is worded as it is.

Paul is not weighing your trouble against nothing. He is weighing it against glory, and the comparison is the entire structure of the sentence. Light is a comparative word here, not a descriptive one. He is not saying the affliction is small. He is saying that when you put it on the scale opposite eternal glory, this is what happens to the balance.

And you cannot use half of a comparison. A man who says light affliction and stops has not quoted the verse; he has quoted a fragment and left out the thing it was being compared to.

You have been handed half a sentence and asked to live under it. That is what happens when the comparison is dropped, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the whole verse honest again for a woman who has been sitting on the edge of a bed, because Scripture says He guides into all truth and not into a smaller version of it.

What the same man wrote three verses earlier

And there is something else worth knowing about the person who wrote that line.

The chapter it sits in is not a comfortable chapter. Troubled on every side. Perplexed. Persecuted. Cast down. Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus.

That is the same man, in the same passage, four verses before he says light affliction.

He is not a man minimizing suffering from a safe distance. He is a man who has been beaten and shipwrecked and left for dead, writing about his own life, and using the word light only as one half of a comparison with something enormous.

You are not arguing with Scripture when you refuse a fragment of it. The word puts troubled and perplexed and cast down in the same passage as light affliction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hold the whole of a passage rather than the piece that has been said at them.

What it works

Now the middle of the verse, which is the part that is actually doing something.

Worketh for us. The affliction is described as working. Producing. Doing something rather than merely being endured.

And I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where somebody could turn your two years into a lesson and I am not going to.

Paul does not say the affliction is good. He does not say it was sent. He does not explain it, and nowhere in that chapter does he suggest that a person should be grateful for the thing itself. He says it is working toward something, and that the something is on a scale that changes what the balance reads.

You are not being asked to call the weight light or to be grateful for it. Scripture puts the working in the affliction and the glory on the other side of the scale, and the Holy Spirit is called the earnest of that glory, which means it is guaranteed rather than argued for.

And I will keep it honest, because you have had a doorway full of the other thing. Nothing here makes what is in your house smaller and nothing here explains it. What is settled is that the verse is a comparison and that you were handed half of it by a man who has never picked it up.