She Says She Already Showed Me

She says it kindly. That is worth putting first.

She is not sighing at you and she is not making a point. She says, I showed you this, and she says it the way somebody says a plain fact, and then she does it, and then the conversation moves on.

And you nod. And privately, something goes cold.

Because you cannot remember it. Not the time she means, not the room, not the sitting down, not the doing of it. There is nothing there at all.

And there are two ways to explain that, and you have been quietly choosing the worse one for about a year.

The worse explanation is that your memory is going. The better one is that something happened that looked like being shown and was not, and that nothing was ever laid down because nothing was ever put in your hands.

I want to spend this piece on the second one, because I think it is true, and because a man deciding privately that his mind is failing is carrying something enormous that nobody has weighed with him.

Line upon line, here a little, and there a little

There is a verse describing how instruction actually goes into a person, and it is one of the most patient sentences in the Bible.

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, King James Version)

Read how many times it repeats itself. That is not the translator being clumsy. The sentence is built to sound like what it describes.

Precept upon precept. Line upon line. Here a little, and there a little. Nobody in that verse is learning anything the first time.

You are learning the way this verse describes learning, and no human being has ever once taken a thing in on the first pass. Isaiah 28:10 says precept upon precept, line upon line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary for a man who has been ashamed of needing it twice.

Notice the phrase here a little, and there a little. Not one long session. Small amounts, spread out, coming back around.

That is not a description of a weak student. It is a description of teaching, done properly, by anybody who has ever taught anything.

You have been given the pattern God Himself uses, and a little at a time has never once been the slow lane for anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who teaches the way this verse teaches, and it is written that the lines come one upon another rather than all at once.

And there is something worth knowing about the context, which is that this verse appears in a passage where the people are being mocked for needing things repeated. Somebody was sneering at them for it.

The sneer is in the text. And the way God speaks about instruction, right there in the middle of it, is line upon line, here a little, and there a little.

You were never the first person to be looked down on for needing it twice, and being mocked for it has never once made the pattern wrong. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the sting out of an old shame, and Scripture puts the repeating right beside the mocking on the same page.

Told once is not taught

Now let me be concrete, because the question of whether your memory is going deserves a real answer and not a comfort.

Think about how that showing actually happened. She had the thing. She did it. You watched her face or her hands from the side. It took a few seconds. Then the moment ended and something else started.

That is being told, and it happened once, and it happened with your hands empty.

Nothing on this earth goes in that way. Not a knot, not a recipe, not a route through a town. Not one thing anybody has ever learned went in from watching somebody do it once while their own hands were empty.

You are not failing to remember a lesson, and a thing watched once from the side has never once been a lesson anybody could have kept. The Spirit of God is the one who separates what a man could not hold from what was never handed to him, and Isaiah 28:10 sets out the repeating as the normal shape of teaching.

And here is the second half, which is about her rather than about you. When she says I showed you, she is being accurate. She did show you. She is not misremembering and she is not scoring a point.

Two things are true at once. She showed you, and you were not taught. Both of those are facts and neither of them is anybody's fault.

You have been living with two true things that look like a contradiction, and neither one has ever once been evidence against a man's mind. The written word describes instruction as something that comes round again and again, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets two true things sit in a room without a verdict.

Say the two sentences

Now the small thing, and it is two sentences long.

I am not going to suggest a conversation about your memory. That is a large subject, and this is not that, and turning this into that would be the wrong move entirely.

What is needed is something to say at the exact moment she says, I showed you this.

You are able to say something true at the moment it is needed, and one sentence has never once been an argument with anybody. Isaiah 28:10 puts line upon line as the way it goes in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a man says a hard small thing to his own wife.

Here are the two sentences. I know you showed me. I need it again, and this time I will hold it.

The first one matters as much as the second. It agrees with her, immediately and without qualification, and it takes the whole argument off the table before it starts. She said a true thing. Agreeing with it costs nothing and clears the ground.

The second one asks for the different thing. Not the same showing again. The one where the hands are yours.

You are agreeing with her and asking for something different in the same breath, and two sentences have never once been a dispute in anybody's kitchen. The Spirit of God is the one who puts the right words in a man's mouth at the right second, and it is written that the teaching comes here a little and there a little rather than once and for all.