I Have Never Made Anything Before

You are not a man who makes things.

That has been a settled fact about you for fifty years and nobody in your family would describe you any other way. You buy well. You choose carefully. You have never in your life sat down with your hands and produced an object.

And then in about March you did.

You could not entirely tell anybody why. There was a thought and then a Saturday and then a second Saturday, and somewhere around the fourth one it stopped being an experiment.

And it is finished now and it is out in the shed under the work light and you go and look at it.

And you are more frightened of handing that over than you have ever been of handing over anything in your life.

That is worth taking seriously rather than laughing off, and there is a verse about different kinds of working that has something to say about a first one.

Diversities of operations

Here it is.

And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. (1 Corinthians 12:6, King James Version)

Diversities of operations. Different kinds of working, listed as a plain fact and not as a ranking.

That whole passage is built to stop people arranging themselves into an order. It keeps saying, in three different ways, that the variety is the design rather than a problem to be sorted out.

You have been arranging yourself into an order that the passage refuses, and 1 Corinthians 12:6 calls them diversities rather than levels. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept saying it three different ways in that chapter, and He said it three times because people do not believe it once.

Now the second half, which is the part that covers a first attempt.

It is the same God which worketh all in all. The same source is behind every one of the operations, including the ones nobody has done before and the ones being done badly.

There is no clause anywhere in it about competence. The working is the same working.

You are running the same operation as anybody who has done it for thirty years, and it is written that the same God worketh all in all rather than that He works the skilled ones. The Spirit of God is the one who is behind a fourth Saturday in a shed, and He was behind it before you could have said why you were out there.

And here is what the verse does with the fact that this is your first.

Nothing. It does not mention it. A first working and a thousandth working are both operations and the passage does not distinguish between them anywhere.

You have been the only person in this making a distinction, and His word lists diversities without ever grading them. The Holy Spirit is the one who left the grading out, and the leaving out is what makes a first thing possible for a man of fifty.

Why a first thing is so exposing

Now let me name why this one is worse than anything handed over before it, because it is not irrational.

Everything given before this came with a track record behind it.

A man who chooses well is what everybody in that family knows. If something did not quite land, it sat inside forty years of choosing well and was absorbed by that.

A first thing has no track record behind it. There is nothing for it to sit inside. It arrives alone and it is entirely the man.

You have nothing behind this one to absorb it, and it is written that the operations are diverse rather than that any of them come with a guarantee. The Spirit of God is the one who names a real exposure without minimizing it, and this one is real.

And there is a second thing, and it is the one underneath.

Making it meant wanting to. Fifty years of not, and then four Saturdays, and the wanting is visible in the object in a way that choosing something never is.

Handing it over means somebody seeing that you wanted to make something. That is a more private thing to reveal than almost anything else a man does.

You have been protecting a want rather than an object, and Scripture puts the same God behind every kind of working rather than behind the confident ones. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the want there in March, and He put it there without asking anybody's permission.

And a plain word about the thing itself.

It will be a first attempt and it will look like one in places, and the person receiving it will see that.

They will also see that a man who has never made anything made something. Those two facts arrive at the same moment, in the same object, and the second one is considerably larger than the first.

You are handing over both of those at once, and it is written that there are diversities of operations and the same God works in all of them. The Spirit of God is the one who makes the second fact land harder than the first, and it lands harder every time.

Give it as a first thing

So here is what to do, and the whole of it is in how it gets handed over.

Give it. This year. Not next year when there has been a second one to compare it against and not when it has been improved.

You are able to give the first one, and 1 Corinthians 12:6 makes no distinction between a first working and any other. The Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man out to a shed with both hands rather than with a plan, and He got you out there in March.

And do not call it a first attempt.

That is the sentence that will want out, and it will feel honest and modest and it will be neither. Calling it a first attempt hands the room a category, and the category is one that comes with an allowance in it.

They will then receive it kindly, inside the allowance, and the kindness will be real and it will not be what you wanted.

You are able to hand it over without a category attached, and it is written that the working is the same working rather than that a first one needs a note. The Spirit of God is the one who takes that sentence out of a man's mouth, and it is the only sentence in this that matters.

And say one thing instead, and it is four words.

I made this. And then their name. That is the whole of it and it takes about two seconds and it says everything the long version was trying to say.

You have four words that do more than any explanation, and the written word names the operations plainly and moves on rather than qualifying any of them. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes four words sufficient, and they are sufficient because they are true.