I Think In Numbers And Always Have

You like a column that adds up.

That is not a joke about you and I am not going to make one. There is a particular satisfaction in a set of figures that reconciles, and you have felt it for forty years, and it is a real pleasure of a real kind.

You are precise. You are orderly. You notice when a thing is a little out.

And somewhere along the line, you took all of that and drew a conclusion from it, and the conclusion was: therefore I am the other sort.

Not the creative sort. The sensible sort. The one who is good with the accounts and does not have a feel for colors and would not know where to begin with a blank page.

I want to look at the logic in that, because it is doing something to you and it does not hold.

Precision is not the opposite of making. It is one of the ways of making. There are whole crafts that consist almost entirely of getting a thing exactly right, and the people who do them are not classified as the non creative ones, they are called jewellers and cabinetmakers and bookbinders.

What you have actually got is a specific set of instincts, and you have been reading them as an absence rather than as a shape.

And there is a second thing under it, which I suspect is the load bearing one. A column of figures either reconciles or it does not. There is an answer. And a thing made with your hands does not have an answer, and a mind that has spent forty years enjoying answers finds that genuinely uncomfortable.

That is not a deficiency. That is a preference, and preferences can be sat with.

We are the clay, and thou our potter

Isaiah says something about the whole of us that puts everybody in the same material, and I want it read with the second half in view.

But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. (Isaiah 64:8, King James Version)

We all are the work of thy hand.

All. Not the artistic ones. Not the ones with a feel for it. Every single person in that sentence is a made thing that came off the same wheel, and the sentence is about being made rather than about making, which is where it has to start.

You are a work of His hand yourself, and Isaiah 64:8 puts the whole of us in one material without sorting anybody into types. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a prayer of a whole nation and lays it on a woman who has spent forty years enjoying columns.

And notice the image chosen. A potter. Not a mathematician, though God would have been entitled to either. The picture Scripture reaches for when it wants to describe how you came to exist is somebody making a thing with their hands.

You have come off a wheel rather than out of a calculation, and it is already settled in the written word that the maker's image is the one used about you. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has never once thought of herself in those terms.

The measuring can be put down for twenty minutes

Now let me be practical, because I think this is where the actual freedom is for you.

I am not going to ask you to become imprecise. That would be asking a woman to stop being herself, and this site does not do that.

What I am going to ask is narrower and it will be harder than it sounds.

Put the measuring down for twenty minutes.

You are clay under a potter's hand, and Isaiah 64:8 says we all are the work of thy hand with no exception written in anywhere. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a maker's picture true of an orderly mind as much as of any other.

Not forever. Not as a new personality. For twenty minutes, make a thing without checking whether it is right, and let it be a little out, and do not correct it.

That will be uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with skill. Your eye will find the discrepancy inside about a minute, and everything in you will want to true it up, and the wanting is not a fault, it is forty years of good practice arriving at a moment where it does not apply.

And this: how the thing comes out is not a measure of you, and neither is the fact that it does not reconcile. There is no answer at the back of the book for a made object.

You are not the wrong sort of person, and heaven has never once issued minds in two kinds with one of them left out. Isaiah 64:8 says we all are the work of thy hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses a classification a woman made about herself.

And do not go and take up something orderly to prove the point either. Do not choose a craft with rules so that your precision has somewhere to go. Not tonight. Tonight is the one without rules.

You have permission to make something that is a little out, and this is yours: the potter's hand is the picture Scripture uses about all of us. It is written in Isaiah 64:8 that we are the clay, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of an orderly mind as much as of any other.

Twenty minutes, and no measuring

So here is the ask.

Tonight, make one thing in twenty minutes without measuring anything.

No ruler. No checking. Do not mark it out first, do not count anything, and do not lay a straight edge on it at any point, including at the end.

Use whatever is already in the house. Cut by eye. Fold by eye. Judge it by looking rather than by a number.

You have come off the same wheel as everybody else, and Isaiah 64:8 says we all are the work of thy hand with no type left out. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that cover an orderly mind exactly as it covers any other.

It will be out. Visibly. And you will know exactly how far out, because that is what your eye does, and there is no version of this where you do not see it.

Leave it out. Do not true it up tonight and do not true it up tomorrow.

You are covered while it sits there a little wrong, and Isaiah 64:8 is the ground under that. The written word puts all of us in the same clay under the same hand, and the Spirit of God is present in a front room with a ruler pushed to one side.