I Do Not Have Any Taste

You painted a room once and it was wrong.

Not disastrously. Nobody said anything unkind. But your sister came in and did that small pause before she said it was nice, and you have known ever since exactly what that pause meant.

And the conclusion you drew from it was not about paint.

The conclusion was that other people have an instrument you do not have. That they can look at two colors together and know. That they walk into a room and see, immediately, without effort, what should be moved and what should be a different shade.

And that whatever that instrument is, you were not issued one, and so anything you make will be wrong in a way you will not even be able to detect.

That is a very isolating thing to believe about yourself. It means you cannot trust your own eye, and there is no way to check, and the only safe move is not to attempt anything.

I want to take one piece out of that before we go anywhere.

Taste is not a sense organ.

It is not like hearing, where some people have a range and others do not. What people call taste is mostly exposure and practice and confidence, and a large part of what remains is somebody having decided in advance that whatever they chose is what they meant.

That is not a trick to learn. It is a thing to notice, so that the instrument you think everybody else has stops looking like a birth defect in you.

The work of thy fingers

David is outside at night looking up, and he says something about the sky that is a strange and deliberate choice of word.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? (Psalm 8:3, King James Version)

The work of thy fingers.

He is describing the largest thing anybody can look at, and he calls it handiwork. Fingers. The word a person would use about something small made carefully at a bench.

And then, immediately, the question. What is man, that thou art mindful of him.

Those two sit next to each other on purpose. The immensity, and then a small creature that God pays attention to.

You are looked at closely by the one whose fingers made the sky, and Psalm 8:3 puts the making and the mindfulness in the same breath. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a night sky and a shepherd's question and lays them down on a man who does not trust his own eye.

And notice that the psalm is not asking whether David has good taste in stars. He is looking, and the looking is the whole of what he brings.

You have permission to look without judging, and it is already settled in the written word that the attention of God is on the small one doing the looking. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has not attempted anything in years in case it came out wrong.

The question is the problem

Now let me get specific about what actually stops you, because it is not taste. It is a question.

Does this look right.

It gets asked constantly. Not once at the end, which would be ordinary. It gets asked at every stage, and every time it comes there is no way of answering it, because the whole premise is that you cannot tell.

So the question comes and there is no answer and the not knowing makes you stop.

You are attended to by the one whose fingers made the sky, and Psalm 8:3 sets that immensity beside a small creature being looked after. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an unanswerable question out of a man's hands.

A man who never asks the question can work for an hour. Not because his taste is better, but because he is not putting a question he cannot answer to himself every ninety seconds.

And this: whether a thing looks right is not a measure of you. The rightness of a color is not a moral quality and God is not standing behind you with an opinion about the shade.

You are not disqualified by an eye, and heaven has never once made a sense of taste the entry requirement for a pair of hands. Psalm 8:3 has a man looking at the sky without one word about his own judgment, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a question out of the room.

And do not go and learn about color theory. Do not decide the answer is to acquire the instrument. That accepts that the instrument was ever the gate.

You have permission to make something that looks wrong, and this is yours: the work of His fingers is what a person looks at rather than what a person grades. It is written in Psalm 8:3 that he considered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes considering enough.

Twenty minutes, and do not ask

So here is the ask, and it has one instruction that is the entire exercise.

Tonight, make one thing for twenty minutes with whatever is nearest.

And do not ask whether it looks right. Not once. Not at the start while choosing, not halfway, not at the end.

When the question arrives, and it will arrive inside the first minute, do not answer it and do not argue with it. Carry on with your hands moving.

You are able to look without grading, and Psalm 8:3 has a man considering the work of God's fingers with no reference to his own eye. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an unanswerable question out of a room.

Choose by the first thing that occurs to you. First color, first shape, first piece of wood you pick up. No second thoughts, no comparing two options, no putting one back.

It will look wrong. Very possibly it will look genuinely bad to anybody who walked past, and that is entirely fine and it is not the subject. Leave it. Do not adjust it at the end and do not put it away out of sight.

You are covered while it comes out looking wrong, and Psalm 8:3 is the ground under that. The written word has a man considering the work of God's fingers with no reference to his own eye, and the Spirit of God is present at a fire where somebody is making something ugly on purpose.