My Friends All Picked It Up And I Did Not

They took to it and you did not.

Same school. Same town. Same years, more or less the same jobs. Three of them can do things on a screen without appearing to think about it, and you cannot, and you have been quietly working on an explanation for that for a while.

You have two candidate explanations and you have been going back and forth between them.

The first is that they were shown something you were not. Somewhere along the line somebody sat them down.

The second is that the difference is in you.

And you have started settling on the second one, because the first one requires a room you cannot locate, and the second one is available and needs no evidence.

I want to introduce a third possibility, which is that you have no idea how any of them learned it, and have never once asked.

That sounds too simple to be worth an afternoon. Sit with it a moment.

You have watched three men appear competent. You have never seen one of them learn anything. Appearing competent and having learned easily are two completely different things, and the outside of a man tells you nothing whatsoever about which one you are looking at.

The LORD looketh on the heart

There is a line about how God looks at a person, and it is set against how everybody else does.

For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7, King James Version)

Man looketh on the outward appearance. That is not a criticism in that sentence so much as a description. It is simply what a person is able to see.

The outward appearance is all any of us gets of anybody else, and it is a very thin report.

You are looked at by somebody who does not read the outside of a man, and no outward appearance has ever once told anybody what it cost the person to produce it. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain to a man comparing himself to three faces.

Notice the situation the verse comes from. Samuel is looking at a line of brothers and getting it wrong, repeatedly, on the basis of how they appear.

And he is a prophet. He is not a careless man. He is the best judge in the room and the outward appearance still fools him seven times running.

You have been misreading appearances in company with a prophet, and no man has ever once been able to read another man's inside from his outside. The Holy Spirit is the one who corrects a reading that a careful person got wrong, and it is written that Samuel was mistaken about seven of them before he was right about one.

And notice what God does not say. He does not tell Samuel he should have been able to tell.

He tells him what he is working with. Man looketh on the outward appearance, and that is stated as a limit rather than as a fault.

You were never equipped to see what you have been trying to see, and no limit built into a man has ever once been a failing in him. The Spirit of God is the one who names a limit without turning it into a charge, and Scripture puts the difference between the two kinds of seeing as a plain fact.

What you have actually observed

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not settle a question a man has been chewing for years.

List what has actually been seen, honestly. Three men doing things without visible difficulty, in one room, on ordinary afternoons.

Now list what you have not seen. You have not seen any of them at home on their own. You have not seen the times they could not do something. You have not seen who taught them, or when, or how many goes it took, or what they got wrong in front of nobody.

You are working from about four percent of the evidence, and no confident afternoon has ever once been a record of how somebody got there. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what a person has actually observed, and 1 Samuel 16:7 puts the outward appearance forward as the thin thing it is.

And here is the part nobody has ever told you. Men do not narrate this to each other.

Not one of your friends has ever said, I could not work that out for six weeks. Not one of them has said, my daughter showed me that four times. Those sentences do not get said between men of your generation, in your town, about anything.

So the competence is visible and the learning is invisible, always, in every direction. That is a gap in what men tell each other, and it is not a gap in you.

You have been shown the finished thing and never once the making of it, and no man in that group has ever narrated one difficult afternoon to another. The written word calls the outward appearance what it is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man what is actually being kept from view.

Ask one of them

Now the small thing, and it is one question to one friend.

I am not going to suggest a conversation about feelings. That would be a large thing and it would embarrass two men at once, and it is not what is needed.

Ask one of them how they learned it.

You are able to ask one friend one plain question, and one question about somebody else has never once been a statement about the man asking it. 1 Samuel 16:7 makes the outward appearance an unreliable report, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a man asks something he has wondered about for years.

Ask it as a question about them, which is what it is. How did you pick that up?

Not, was it easy for you. Not, am I the only one. Those are questions about you wearing a coat, and they invite reassurance rather than information.

How did you pick that up is a question about a man's life, and men will answer that one, at length, because it is a story about themselves.

And then let them answer the whole way. Do not interrupt to say you are hopeless. Do not fill the pause. Let the story run.

You are asking for a story rather than for comfort, and one question about somebody's own life has never once been an imposition on a friend. The Spirit of God is the one who puts the right question in a man's mouth, and it is written that the seeing which matters looks past the outside.