I Stand There Every Year With No Idea

You went in to solve it.

You had half an hour and a clear head and you went up one side and down the other, and you looked at a great many things, and not one of them was the answer.

So you walked the same stretch again, slower, in case the answer had been sitting there the first time and you had gone past it.

It had not.

And you came out with nothing, again, and you will go back next week and do it again, and this happens every year with the same person.

Let me take one explanation off the table before we go any further, because I think it has been sitting in your chest for a while now.

You are not bad at this. That is not the problem, and it never was.

I want to say what the problem actually is, because it is a much smaller thing than the one you have been carrying, and it has a fix that costs nothing.

There is a verse in Proverbs about exactly this. Not about giving. About knowing a person.

Counsel in the heart is deep water

Here is the line.

Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out. (Proverbs 20:5, King James Version)

Read the first half again, because it is the half that lets you off.

What a person actually wants is not on the surface of them. It is not in their conversation, it is not on their walls, and it is certainly not written anywhere that you could have found it by trying harder in a shop.

It is deep water. That is the Bible's own word for it, and it is not a criticism of you for failing to see the bottom of it from where you stand.

You have not been failing to see something obvious, and Proverbs 20:5 calls it deep water before it says anything about a man of understanding at all. The Holy Spirit is the one who wrote the difficulty into the verse ahead of the method, and He put it there first for a reason.

Now the second half, which is the one that actually helps.

A man of understanding will draw it out. Draw it out. That is a bucket and a rope and a slow pull, and it is a completely different activity from looking at objects on a shelf.

Nobody draws water by staring hard at the well.

You have been given a method rather than a talent, and it is written that understanding draws the counsel out rather than guessing at it. The Spirit of God has never once handed a man a job without handing him the tool for it, and Proverbs 20:5 is that tool in one sentence.

So let me put the method in plain words, because it is not complicated and it is not clever, and both of those are the point.

What drawing it out actually looks like

People tell you what they love all year long. Constantly. In passing, sideways, in half sentences, while they are doing something else.

They mention a thing twice. They stop in front of something and then move on. They say I have always wanted to and then change the subject because it sounded like too much. They replace something worn out with the exact same thing, which tells you they were right about it the first time.

None of that is said to you as information. That is the whole trouble. It goes past at ordinary speed in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, and there is no reason on earth for you to catch it, and you do not catch it, and then in December you are standing in an aisle trying to invent from nothing what they already told you in March.

You were told, and Proverbs 20:5 says the counsel is in there and can be drawn out by a man who is paying attention rather than by a man who is clever. His Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary sentence stay in a man's mind long enough to be caught, and that is not a gift for some people and not others.

So the drawing out is one thing, and one thing only.

Write it down when it happens.

Not in December. In March, in June, in the middle of a phone call, on the back of anything. One line. The thing they mentioned twice.

That is the whole method. There is nothing else in it.

You are able to do this today, and the written word puts the drawing out in the hands of a man of understanding rather than a man of imagination. The Holy Spirit is the one who turns a note on a scrap of paper into something that lands in somebody's hands nine months later.

Why the aisle was never going to work

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that turns into a lecture and I am not giving you one.

There is nothing wrong with the aisle. There is nothing wrong with wanting to hand somebody something good. That want is a decent thing in a man and I am not going to talk you out of it.

The aisle is the wrong end of the job, that is all it is. It is where the giving finishes. The knowing happens somewhere else entirely, months earlier, in a kitchen, in a car, on a walk, and by the time you get to the shelf the work is either already done or it is not.

Which means the half hour with a clear head was never going to produce it. Not because you lack something. Because you were drawing water at the wrong well.

You have been working hard in the wrong month, and Proverbs 20:5 says the counsel sits in the heart of the man and waits to be drawn rather than appearing on a shelf in December. The Spirit of God is the one who has kept this from being about your ability the entire time.

And here is the part I think you need most.

The thing you eventually give does not have to be clever. It has never once had to be clever. Clever is what a man reaches for when he does not know the person, because clever is a way of covering the not knowing with effort.

When you actually know one small true thing about somebody, the gift built out of it can be almost nothing at all and it lands like a hand on a shoulder.

You were never being asked for clever, and it is written that a man of understanding draws it out rather than a man of invention dressing it up. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a small true thing carry that much weight in another person's hands.