Hard At Work Frozen At Home

At eleven in the morning you sign off on something that would frighten most people.

You know the tolerances. You know what goes wrong and why. Somebody younger asks you a question and you answer it in one sentence and they walk away satisfied, and it costs you nothing, because you have done it eleven thousand times.

At seven that evening you stand in your own kitchen in front of a drawer that will not close, and nothing happens.

Not fear exactly. Something quieter and worse. A kind of blank. And behind the blank there is a sentence, and the sentence says: if I were really any good, this would not stop me.

That sentence is a lie and I want it out of the way before we go on. Not knowing how is not a character flaw. Competence at work and competence at home are two entirely separate bodies of knowledge, and the only thing standing between them is that somebody trained you in one and nobody ever trained you in the other.

I have not proved them

There is a moment before the most famous fight in the Bible that almost nobody talks about, and it is entirely about this.

And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him. (1 Samuel 17:39, King James Version)

Saul put the best armor in the kingdom on that young man. It was not bad armor. It was the king's own, and any soldier in that valley would have taken it.

And David walked four steps and took it off, and the reason he gives is one of the most practical sentences in Scripture. I have not proved them. Meaning: I have never used these. My body does not know them.

You have been standing in armor nobody ever trained you in, and being unable to move in it has never once been a fault in the man wearing it. First Samuel 17:39 has the best equipment in Israel come off because it had not been proved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that read as sense rather than as a young man's failure.

And look at what he did instead. He went and got the thing he had used ten thousand times in a field, and he used that, and nobody ever called him a lesser soldier for it.

You are allowed to name what you have proved and what you have not, and telling the truth about the difference has never once made a man smaller. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person the nerve to take off something that does not fit, and it is written in First Samuel that the whole matter came down to what had been proved and what had not.

Two rooms, two educations

Here is the thing worth understanding, because it dissolves most of the shame on contact.

Everything a man can do at work, somebody taught him. Somebody stood beside you. There were weeks of doing it wrong. There was a person who corrected you, more than once, sometimes sharply. There was a stretch of being slow and frightened and not wanting anybody to watch.

You have forgotten all of that, because competence erases its own history. That is what competence does. By the four hundredth time, it feels like something you have always been able to do.

You have a whole education behind your working hands that has gone invisible to you, and forgetting how you learned has never once meant you learned it easily. It is written in First Samuel 17:39 that a man distinguished between the proved and the unproved out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can show a man his own training when he has stopped seeing it.

So the drawer at seven in the evening is not a different man. It is the same man at week one instead of year eleven. There is no shame anywhere in week one. You simply have not been in week one for a very long time and have forgotten what it feels like.

That blank feeling is not incompetence. That is what beginning feels like, and twenty years of doing one thing extremely well has kept it a long way out of reach.

Now the limit, and I say it in the body where you are standing. Never a gas appliance, never the breaker panel, never mains wiring, never a wall that holds the building up, never a roof. Call a licensed professional and pay them properly. You do this every day at work without a flicker of shame, and it is the same move here.

You are entirely right to hand over what belongs to somebody licensed, and calling a specialist has never once been the confession the shame says it is. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man calm about a boundary, and Scripture has the young man refuse the armor out loud in front of a king and lose nothing by it.

Count the training out loud

So here is the ask, and there are two halves to it.

Do one small job at home tonight. And while your hands are on it, count out loud how many times somebody trained you at work.

Say it plainly. Somebody showed me this in ninety six. I got it wrong for about four months. Old Ray corrected me twice a week for a year. Nobody has ever shown me how a drawer runner comes out.

You are able to say your own history out loud while your hands are working, and naming the training you were given has never once been the same as making an excuse. The Spirit of God is the one who turns a private accusation into a plain fact, and First Samuel 17:39 records a man saying out loud what he had and had not proved.

That counting does something specific. It converts the difference between the two rooms from a mystery into an accounting, and mysteries breed shame while accounting does not.

Then do the small job at week one speed. Which means slowly, with pauses, looking at things, getting it wrong once. That is not you being bad at this. That is what week one has always looked like, including in nineteen ninety six, in a building you now run.

You have permission to be at week one in your own kitchen at fifty three, and beginning something late has never once contradicted anything you have proved elsewhere. It is written in First Samuel that a man put off armor he had not proved and used what he had, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the kitchen with you.