Nobody Ever Showed Me How To Do This

There is a particular way this comes up and it is always in front of other people.

Somebody mentions bleeding a radiator, or changing a washer, or putting up a shelf that stays up, and they say it the way you would say boiling a kettle. And everybody in the room nods along. And you nod along too, and you have no idea, and the nodding is automatic and has been for twenty years.

That is the moment I want to talk about. Not the job. The nodding.

Because you are not standing there thinking I have not learned that yet. You are standing there thinking something much worse and much older, which goes roughly: everybody was given this and I was not, and there is something missing in me that other people can see.

And I want to say clearly, before anything else: that is not what happened.

What happened is that nobody showed you. That is all. Somebody was meant to stand next to you at fifteen and hand you a thing and let you do it badly, and for whatever reason, they did not. Maybe they were not there. Maybe they were there and doing it themselves was faster. Maybe they did not know either and were nodding in rooms of their own.

None of that is a fact about your worth. It is a fact about your education, and those are not the same thing, and you have been treating them as the same thing for a long time.

Then the LORD will take me up

There is a short line in the psalms about what happens when the people who were supposed to do something did not do it.

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

Then the LORD will take me up.

Now, that word forsake is heavy, and I am not going to put it on your parents when I do not know them. For plenty of readers here nobody forsook anybody; there was just a father who was working, or a mother who had six other things, or a house where nobody knew this either.

But look at the shape of the sentence, because the shape is the help. It names a gap that was left by the people who were supposed to fill it. It does not argue about whose fault the gap was. And it says that God Himself steps into that exact space.

Take me up is a picture of being picked up off the ground, the way you lift a child. It is not a rebuke and it is not advice. It is somebody arriving where a person was left.

You are picked up in the exact place where you were not taught, and heaven has never once treated a gap in your education as a gap in your worth. Psalm 27:10 puts the Lord in the space the people who should have been there left empty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific rather than sentimental.

Two things that are not the same

I want to separate two things you have had joined together for years, because once they are apart this gets much lighter.

One is a skill. A skill is a set of steps that a person can be shown, and if nobody shows you, you do not have them. That is arithmetic, not character. There are grown men who cannot swim and grown women who cannot drive and it is because nobody took them.

The other is worth. Whether you are competent as a person. Whether you are a proper adult.

You have been reading the first as evidence of the second. So every time the subject comes up in a room, you are not missing information, you are being exposed, and that is why the nodding is automatic and why you have not looked anything up in twenty years. Nobody looks things up under those conditions. The looking up would be an admission.

You are missing steps that nobody showed you, and that has never once been evidence about the kind of person you are. The written word puts God in the gap without ever calling the gap a fault in the one who was left, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a skill from a worth in somebody who has held them together since they were fifteen.

Watch it and do not do it

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not the job.

Watch one short video of the job all the way through, and do not do it tonight.

That is the whole thing. Pick the one you have been nodding about. Watch somebody do it, start to finish, and then close it and go to bed.

I am asking that because doing it is not where the block is. The block is in the looking up. Watching is the exposure you have been avoiding, and it is entirely private, and nobody will ever know that you did it. Once you have watched one thing through, the wall that has stood since you were fifteen has a hole in it, and the hole does not close again.

And a word here that this site says in every article and means: some jobs are not yours. Anything with gas, anything inside the fuse box, anything structural, anything up a ladder taller than a step stool. Those are not a test of your competence and they are not what this is about. You name a professional and you move on, and there is no shame anywhere in that.

Psalm 27:10 says then the LORD will take me up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a man watching a video in his own kitchen at forty-eight.

You are able to look it up tonight, and it has never once been an admission of anything. Psalm 27:10 puts God in the place where nobody taught you, and the Spirit of God is the one who is beside somebody learning late.