I Watched A Video And Got More Frightened

Sasha did the responsible thing. That is what makes this worth writing about.

She had a car and did not know anything about it and decided to fix that, which is admirable, and she went and found a video. A good one. Highly rated, forty one minutes, made by a man who clearly knew what he was doing and explained things well.

She watched the whole thing on a Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea.

And at the end of forty one minutes she felt worse than she had at the beginning, and she has not gone near the subject since.

Now, here is what happened, and it is not what she thinks happened.

She thinks she found out that this is beyond her.

What actually happened is that she took a forty one minute dose of a thing she had zero of, and a person cannot absorb that. In forty one minutes that man named, by a rough count, somewhere north of sixty separate things. Sixty. Each one of which he assumed his viewer already had a place to put.

Sasha had no places. So sixty things arrived at once and none of them landed anywhere, and what she was left with at the end was not sixty facts. It was a feeling, and the feeling was: there is a very great deal of this and I have none of it.

That is not a lesson. That is a flood.

And the terrible thing about a flood is what it teaches. Not information. It teaches a person the size of the gap, in one sitting, with no handhold, and the size of the gap is the single most discouraging fact available about any subject.

Her brother said in August, "Just look it up, there's loads on there."

And Sasha said, "I did."

And he said, "And?"

And she said, "It's fine," and changed the subject, and he had no idea he had just been told something.

The dose was wrong, not the person

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

I am not going to send you back to that video. And I am not going to tell you the man in it did anything wrong, because he did not. He made a good video for people who already had somewhere to put sixty things. It was not aimed at a beginning, and there is no shame in not being the audience for something.

What I want to look at is dosing, and then at the fact that God has a documented method and it is the opposite of a forty one minute video.

You have not failed at learning, and Scripture nowhere asks a person to take a whole subject in one sitting. Psalm 119 says thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, which is enough light for the next step and deliberately not enough for the whole road, and the Spirit of God is what makes that measure a kindness rather than a limit.

Here is the verse, and it is one of the odder sentences in Isaiah.

For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.Isaiah 28:10

Now, the phrasing is strange on purpose. It is repetitive, and it is almost singsong, and scholars argue about the tone of it. But whatever else is going on, one thing is impossible to miss.

It is describing a method, and the method is small pieces, laid one at a time, with repetition, over time.

Line upon line. Not lines, all at once, in an afternoon. One line, then another line on top of it, then another.

And here a little, and there a little. Which is an explicit statement about quantity. A little. Not a lot. A little.

That is not a description of a person's limitation. It is a description of how a thing gets built into somebody.

You are not a person who cannot learn this, and Scripture describes the method as a little here and a little there rather than as a great deal at once. It is written that it is precept upon precept and line upon line, here a little and there a little, which is a statement about dosage rather than about the capacity of the one learning, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine relief rather than a consolation.

You have never been given the wrong kind of mind for this, and the passage puts the smallness in the method itself. Isaiah 28 makes the little the correct unit rather than the reduced one, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an odd repetitive verse into a Sunday afternoon that could have gone differently.

What a beginning actually looks like

Here is the practical thing, and it is going to sound too small.

One word. This week. Not a video, not a chapter, not a checklist. One word, learned properly, meaning you could explain it to somebody else.

Pick one. Coolant. Dipstick. Tread. Any of them.

Find out what it is, in one or two sentences, and then say it out loud twice, on your own, in the car.

That is the whole week. And next week, if you want to, one more.

Now, I know exactly what that sounds like. It sounds like being handed a child's portion, and everything in a competent woman objects to it.

But look at what happened with the sixty. Sixty produced zero. And one, properly, produces one, and one is infinitely more than zero, and next month it produces four, and four is a place to put a fifth.

That is not a smaller ambition. It is the only arithmetic that has ever worked.

You have permission to take this at the size it actually goes in, and no verse anywhere asks anybody to receive faster than they can hold. Isaiah 28 gives the here a little and there a little as the pattern rather than the concession, and the Spirit of God is what makes one word this week a real and honorable thing.

And I want to say the thing about the feeling, because it is the part that will trip you up.

That feeling from Sunday has not gone anywhere, and it will come back the moment anything starts. It says: this is nothing, look how much there is, this is pretending.

That feeling is not a report. It is the residue of a bad dose, and it has no information in it about you at all.

You were never assessed by that afternoon, and the written word never once treats being overwhelmed as evidence about a person's capacity. It is written that He giveth power to the faint and to them that have no might He increaseth strength, which is Isaiah 40 naming who the supply is for rather than who has earned it, and His Spirit is what makes that supply available to a beginner rather than to somebody halfway.