My Brothers Were Taught And I Was Not

You were standing right there.

Every time the toolbox came out, you were in the room. You watched the whole thing. You were interested, and you asked questions, and nobody ever told you to leave.

And nobody ever put anything in your hand.

Your brother got handed the flashlight, and then the wrench, and then eventually the whole job. You got handed a dish towel, or nothing at all, or a genuinely kind sentence about how you did not need to worry about that.

Nobody in that house was cruel. That is the part that makes this so hard to hold. There was no moment to point at, no rule that got announced, nothing anybody said out loud that you could disagree with. It simply happened a hundred times in a row and nobody noticed it happening.

And here is what that leaves behind. Not a missing skill, although there is one of those. A question about whether your hands were left out because they were yours.

They were not. Not knowing how is not a character flaw and it never was, and it certainly is not a fact about being a woman.

All the women that were wise hearted

There is a verse in Exodus about the building of the tabernacle that I do not think enough people have read carefully.

And all the women that were wise hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen. (Exodus 35:25, King James Version)

Look at the phrase. Wise hearted, and it is applied to the women, by name, in the middle of the biggest construction project in the book.

That word is the same one used of the craftsmen. It is a skill word. It means a person whose ability lives in their hands and who knows what they are doing, and God's account of that project puts it on the women without qualification and without apology.

You have a place in a construction account that God wrote down Himself, and being female has never once been a reason your hands were left out of anything. Exodus 35:25 calls the women wise hearted in exactly the same language as the craftsmen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land as a fact rather than as a nice thought.

And notice what they did. They did not fetch and carry for somebody. They made the material, and they brought what they had made, and it went into the tent of the presence of God.

You are described in Scripture as somebody whose work goes into the building itself, and a household that never handed you a tool has never once been able to overturn that. The Spirit of God is the one who puts weight where the world took it away, and it is written in Exodus that the wise hearted women brought their own work in their own hands.

Whose it was about

Here is the part I want to be honest about, because there is a lie available in both directions.

It would be easy to tell you that your family thought less of you. Mostly they did not. What actually happened is that a pattern ran, the way patterns do, and the tools went to the boy because that is what the man in that house had seen when he was a boy, and nobody examined it once.

That is not innocent, exactly. It cost you something real. But it was not a judgment on you, and treating it as one hands it far more power than it ever earned.

You have been carrying a verdict that nobody in that house ever actually passed, and an unexamined habit has never once been the same as a decision about your worth. It is written in Exodus 35:25 that the wise hearted women worked with their own hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can separate what was done to a person from what was believed about them.

And it would be equally easy to tell you it was nothing and to move on. It was not nothing. There is a set of ordinary competences you do not have, and getting them at thirty four is harder and lonelier than getting them at nine, and I am not going to pretend that is fine.

Both things are true. It was not about you, and it still cost you.

Now the limit, and I put it here rather than at the bottom. Never a gas appliance, never the breaker panel, never mains wiring, never a wall holding the building up, never a roof. Call a licensed professional and pay them properly. That is not a woman's limit. That is everybody's limit, and the men who know what they are doing observe it too.

You are entirely right to stop where the danger starts, and knowing where a line sits has never once been a smaller kind of competence than crossing it. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person calm about a boundary, and Scripture puts the wise hearted work of women right in the middle of the building account.

Pick one up tonight

So here is the ask, and the important part of it is the second half.

Pick up a tool tonight and use it for something small, with nobody in the room.

Not because there is anything to hide. Because the first time your hands do this, you do not need an audience running commentary, and you certainly do not need the specific audience who has spent thirty years not handing you anything.

You are able to pick up a tool in your own house without asking anybody's permission, and never having been handed one has never once meant you were not allowed to take one. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person nerve in an ordinary hallway, and Exodus 35:25 records women whose skill was named by God without anybody appointing them first.

Pick something small and low stakes. Tighten a handle. Take a cabinet door off and put it back on. Open something up that is already broken so that nothing is at risk.

And go slowly, and be as clumsy as you are, because clumsy is what the first ten minutes of every skill looks like for everybody, including your brother, who was clumsy at nine when nobody was writing it down.

You have permission for your hands to be new at this at thirty four, and a late start has never once produced a lesser result than an early one. It is written in Exodus that the wise hearted brought what their own hands had made, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room with you.