Nobody Ever Showed Me How To Do This

There is a moment that happens to grown adults in hardware stores, and almost nobody admits to it.

You are standing in an aisle. There is a wall of things in front of you. Every single one of them assumes you already know something that you do not know, and the packaging is written by people for whom it is obvious, and there is no version of the question you could ask out loud that would not reveal exactly how far back you are starting from.

So you leave. Or you buy the wrong one and take it home and it does not fit, and that becomes another small private piece of evidence in a case you have been quietly building against yourself for years.

Here is what I want to say first, and I want to say it before anything else at all. Nobody showed you. That is the entire explanation. It is not a hidden defect and it is not a slowness in you and it is not something everybody else was born already knowing.

Not knowing how is not a character flaw. It is a gap in what somebody put in front of you, and gaps in teaching are not the same substance as faults in a person. Those two things get welded together in a lot of people around the age of fourteen, and I want to take a hammer to that weld.

When my father and my mother forsake me

There is a line in Psalm 27 that people usually reach for in the middle of much larger griefs, and I want to bring it here on purpose.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. (Psalm 27:10, King James Version)

Take me up is a picture of being gathered. It is what somebody does with a child who has been left standing somewhere. It is a set of arms arriving.

Now, I want to be careful and honest here. Most people who were never shown how to do things were not forsaken. Their parents were working two jobs, or were never shown either, or genuinely believed there would be time later, or simply did not think of it. That is not abandonment, and I am not going to hand anybody a grievance they do not have.

You have a God who arrives exactly where somebody was left standing, and whatever the reason nobody taught you, the arriving has never once depended on the reason. Psalm 27:10 puts God's gathering at the precise point of a gap, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land as company rather than as an accusation aimed at anybody's parents.

But for some people it was abandonment, and I am not going to smooth that over either. If nobody stood beside you because nobody wanted to, that is a real wound, and it is not the same as being busy.

You are covered by that verse whichever of those it was, and God taking a person up has never once required them to first work out who to blame. The Spirit of God is the one who meets a person in a hardware aisle exactly as readily as in a chapel, and it is written in Psalm 27 that the taking up begins where the teaching stopped.

What actually got handed on

Let me describe the real mechanism, because it is far less personal than it feels.

Practical knowledge does not travel through books. It travels through standing next to somebody. Somebody holds it, you hold it, they say no, like this, and forty seconds later your hands know something that no amount of reading would have given you.

That transfer requires two things: an adult with the skill, and an adult with the time. Take away either one and the transfer does not happen, and the child grows up and has no idea that a transfer was ever supposed to occur.

You have been missing a handover rather than an ability, and never having stood beside somebody has never once meant that your hands are the wrong hands. It is written in Psalm 27:10 that God takes up precisely what was left, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can make a first attempt feel survivable at forty two.

And the cruelty of it is how invisible it is. Nobody walks around announcing that they were shown how to change a washer. So the person who was never shown looks around at a world of people who all seem to know, and concludes that the difference is in them.

The difference is not in you. The difference is a Saturday morning in 1994 that happened to somebody else and did not happen to you.

Now the limit, and I put it here rather than at the bottom. There are jobs nobody should teach themselves out of a video. 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 what they ask. That is not the gap talking. That is what people who do know also do.

You are entirely right to stop at that line, and calling somebody qualified has never once been the same as being unable. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person peace about a boundary, and Scripture puts God's own arms at the place where a person is missing something rather than at the place where they have proved themselves.

Start badly, on purpose, tonight

So here is the ask, and it is the opposite of what you would expect from an article about learning.

Do not learn anything tonight. Do one small job badly.

Not researched. Not prepared. Not preceded by three videos. Pick the smallest broken thing in this house and go and put your hands on it and find out what happens.

You are allowed to begin from where you actually are, and starting a job without knowing how has never once been reckless when the job is a hinge. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a person in an attempt rather than only in a success, and Psalm 27:10 has God taking up somebody who is standing there with nothing.

Here is why badly and on purpose. Every video you watch first is another hour of confirming the sentence that you cannot begin without instruction. The sentence is the problem, not the skill. And the sentence only breaks by being contradicted with your hands.

You will probably do it wrong. That is fine and it is expected and it is not going to break anything, because you are going to pick something small. A drawer. A handle. A hinge. A bulb.

You have permission for the first attempt to look exactly like a first attempt, and a crooked result has never once been able to say anything about the worth of the person holding the screwdriver. It is written in Psalm 27 that God takes up the one left standing, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room with you.