Fluent At Work And Mute In The Driveway

Grace is a theater nurse and has been for nineteen years.

Here is what she does when something new arrives in her department, and she does it without thinking, because it is simply how she works.

She finds out what it is called. She finds out who knows about it. She asks that person three specific questions and writes the answers down. She watches it done once. She asks the one question she still has. Then she does it, badly, once, with somebody there.

That is a method. She has never written it down and she could not name it, and she has used it perhaps two hundred times, and it has never once failed her.

She stood in her driveway in July looking at her own car and could not think of a single thing to do.

Not one. Not a question, not a person, not a first step. She stood there for about ninety seconds and then went inside and made a cup of tea and did not think about it again until the next time.

Now, this is not a story about a woman who is helpless. Grace is one of the most capable people in any room she is in. This is a story about a method that has a fence round it.

Because everything she does at work she does inside a building where she is Grace, the one who has been there nineteen years, who is allowed to not know a new thing because everybody knows what she does know.

In her driveway she is nobody. There is no context that vouches for her. There is just a woman and a car and nothing she can say that would establish that she is competent, and so the method, which requires her to ask three questions of somebody who knows, cannot start, because the first move of it costs something at home that it does not cost at work.

Her husband said in August, "You'd have this sorted at work in a morning."

And Grace said, "It's not the same."

And he said, "Why not?"

And she gave him a good answer, and it was not the true one, and she knew that while she was saying it.

The method is not the problem, the room is

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess at what that car needs, because I have not seen it and it would be no use to anybody. And I am not going to tell a woman with nineteen years in a theater that she lacks confidence, because that is nonsense on its face and she would rightly stop reading.

What I want to look at is the fence, and then at a verse about how a house actually gets built.

Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established: and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.Proverbs 24:3-4

Now notice something about that verse that does not survive most sermons on it.

All three of those words are things that get acquired. Wisdom, understanding, knowledge. Proverbs spends whole chapters telling people to go and get them, to seek them like silver, to buy the truth. They are not temperament. They are not a gift some people are born with.

Which means the house in that verse is not built by a certain kind of person. It is built by a certain kind of acquiring, and the acquiring is available to anybody willing to go and do it.

And Grace already does the acquiring. Professionally. Two hundred times. With a method.

You are not a woman who lacks the method, and Scripture puts the building of a house on knowledge that gets acquired rather than on a kind of person. It is written that through wisdom is a house built and by knowledge the chambers are filled, which describes an acquiring rather than a temperament, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a driveway and not only about a career.

You have been building houses for nineteen years with the exact instrument that verse names. Proverbs 24 puts the filling of the chambers on knowledge sought and gathered, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that instrument portable rather than fixed to a building.

Bring the method home

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is not new knowledge. It is a permission to use what is already there.

Your method has five moves. Name it, find who knows, ask three questions and write the answers, watch it once, do it badly once with somebody there.

Every single one of those works in a driveway. Not one of them requires a hospital.

What the driveway lacks is not the method. It is the standing. At work, asking three questions is what a senior person does and everybody knows it. At home, asking three questions feels like announcing something.

But look at that carefully, because it is not true and it has never been tested.

Nobody at a service counter is running a comparison between you and a version of you who knows about cars. They have no idea who you are. There is no room in which your not-knowing about a car is being measured against your nineteen years, because the only person on earth holding both of those facts at once is you.

You have never been in a room where those two things were compared, and no verse anywhere makes the seeking of knowledge conditional on already being known. Proverbs 24 has the wisdom sought without any reference to who is watching, and the Spirit of God is what makes an unfamiliar counter as ordinary a place to ask as a familiar corridor.

And here is the small first move, and it can happen tonight without anybody present.

Write the three questions. That is all. The three you would ask at work about a thing you did not understand, aimed at this. Not the answers. The questions.

Because a woman with three written questions is not standing mute in a driveway. She is holding the second move of a method that has worked two hundred times.

You were never without a way in, and the written word puts the establishing on understanding that a person goes and gets. Proverbs 24 says by understanding it is established, which is a process rather than a possession, and His Spirit is what makes three written questions the beginning of that rather than an admission of anything.