I Will Not Start Until I Know How

Eleven years is a long time to be about to start something.

That is not a criticism, that is arithmetic, and I say it plainly because I think nobody has ever said the number out loud to you.

You have thought about it the whole time. You have looked at what other people make. You have a folder, or a board, or a mental list of the thing you would begin with. You have almost signed up twice, and one of those times the class was called off and the other time the day did not work.

And underneath it there is a rule, and the rule is the thing I actually want to look at.

You must be taught before you begin.

Not the other way round. Somebody has to show you properly, in order, from the start, so that when you do begin you are doing it right, and not building in bad habits that would have to be undone later.

It sounds like diligence. It sounds like taking a thing seriously rather than dabbling. That is what makes it so difficult to argue with.

But look at what it has produced. Eleven years and nothing made. The rule has not protected any standards, because there has been no work to protect. It has only postponed.

And there is one more thing sitting underneath the rule, and I will say it gently. Being taught properly means being taught by somebody, and being taught by somebody means being seen not knowing.

The waiting is not really about method.

He that observeth the wind

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that reads like it was written for exactly this, and it is not gentle, and it is also not unkind.

The preacher has been on about how much of life cannot be known in advance. And then he says this about a farmer.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. (Ecclesiastes 11:4, King James Version)

He that observeth the wind shall not sow.

You are the careful one in that verse rather than the careless one, and Ecclesiastes 11:4 aims itself at diligence. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves a woman off a sensible rule that has cost her eleven years.

The man in that sentence is not careless. He is careful. He is watching conditions, which is a sensible thing for a farmer to do, and he is waiting until it is right before he commits seed to a field.

And the verse says the result of that carefulness is that he never sows anything at all.

You are the careful one in that verse rather than the careless one, and Ecclesiastes 11:4 aims itself at diligence rather than at laziness. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a farming proverb about weather and lays it on a woman with a folder of things she means to make.

And notice the arithmetic in it. The man watching the sky is not slower than the other farmer. He gets nothing. The two outcomes are not a good harvest and a smaller harvest. They are a harvest and none.

You have a beginning available that does not require conditions, and it is already settled in the written word that waiting for the right wind produces nothing rather than something later. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been reading the sky for eleven years.

Being taught is not the same as beginning

Now let me separate two things that have been fused, because the fusing is where this holds.

Learning properly is good. I am not against instruction and this site is not against anybody who teaches. If in a year you want to be taught, be taught.

But being taught is not a prerequisite for beginning. It never has been in any craft in human history. Every single person who has ever been taught anything had already made a mess of it first, and the teaching landed on somebody who had a mess to compare it to.

You have a beginning that no instruction was ever a gate on, and Ecclesiastes 11:4 puts the sowing before the conditions. The Spirit of God is the one who unlocks a threshold a woman has stood at for over a decade.

The order has been reversed, and the reversed order is the version that never starts.

And this: what comes out of an untaught evening is not a measure of you. It will be bad. Bad is the correct output of a first attempt and it carries no information about a person whatsoever.

You are not required to know how before you begin, and heaven has never once made instruction the gate on a person's own hands. Ecclesiastes 11:4 says the one watching the wind never sows, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person off a sensible rule that has cost eleven years.

And the deeper part, the one about being seen not knowing. Do not solve that by learning in secret first. That is the same rule with the curtains drawn.

You have permission to be a beginner in front of somebody, and this is yours: nothing in the sowing verse waits for competence. It is written in Ecclesiastes 11:4 that the regarding of clouds ends in no reaping, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a woman past a threshold she has stood at for a decade.

Twenty minutes, untaught

So here is the ask, and there is one strict condition.

Tonight, begin. Twenty minutes, with whatever version of the materials is already in the house, however wrong the materials are.

And no instruction. None. Not a video, not a book, not a page, not a diagram. Do not look up how it is supposed to be done, before or during.

You are able to begin without one page of instruction, and Ecclesiastes 11:4 puts the sowing before the conditions rather than after them. His Spirit is the one who gets a woman in through a window when a door has been shut for eleven years.

That is the condition and it is not incidental. Instruction is the door that has been stood in front of for eleven years, and tonight the point is to come in through the window.

You will do it wrong. Properly wrong, in ways that a person who knew would see immediately, and possibly in ways that make the whole thing not work. Good. Those are the mistakes that the teaching, if you ever get it, will land on.

Do not undo it and do not start over when you realize the first bit was wrong. Carry on from the wrong bit.

You are covered while you do it entirely wrong, and Ecclesiastes 11:4 is the ground under that. The written word puts the sowing before the conditions rather than after them, and the Spirit of God is present at a table where somebody is making a mess for the first time in eleven years.