My Lines Have Always Gone Crooked

It goes off to the left. It always has.

You can measure. You can mark it. You can put a straight edge on the thing and follow it with all the attention you have, and by the far end there is a drift, and there has always been a drift, and it is the same drift every time.

Cutting, sewing, drawing, hanging a shelf. Same story.

Other people do not have this problem. That is the sentence underneath, and I want it out in the open because it has been sitting there for a long time doing damage in the dark. Other people put a line down and it is where they put it. Yours arrives somewhere else.

And a long time ago that stopped being an observation about hands and became a finding about a person.

Not good with her hands. Cannot do anything neat. And then, quietly, a step further: not really capable of making anything properly, which is a different claim entirely and a much bigger one, and it got in without anybody checking it at the door.

Here is what I want to say first, plainly, and then we will go to the word.

Some hands are steadier than others. That is a fact of the same order as height. It is not a moral quality, it is not effort, it is not attitude, and it is not something a person earns by trying harder.

Your lines are crooked. That is a fact about your hands and it is not a fact about you.

The Lord looketh on the heart

There is a scene where a prophet is sent to anoint a king, and he gets it wrong twice before he is corrected, and the correction is about exactly this.

Samuel is looking at Eliab, who is tall and looks the part, and he is halfway to a decision. And God stops him.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: 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)

The LORD seeth not as man seeth.

That is not a comforting sentiment, it is a statement about a different pair of eyes. God is not looking at the same surface and He is not reading it the way it gets read down here.

You are seen by eyes that do not read a crooked line the way you read it, and 1 Samuel 16:7 says the seeing itself is different. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a correction given to a prophet in a farmhouse and lays it down on a woman with a ruler in her hand.

And notice that God does not tell Samuel that Eliab is secretly unimpressive. He tells him the instrument he is using cannot see what matters.

You have been assessed with a tool that cannot reach the thing being assessed, and it is already settled in the written word that the outward appearance is not where the reading happens. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been reading her own hands for twenty years.

The drift is not a character

Now let me stay with the drift itself, because I do not want to spiritualize it away and leave you with nothing practical.

The drift is real. I am not going to tell you it is not there or that you would see it differently with a better attitude. It is there. Somebody looking at what you make will see it.

What has happened is that a physical fact acquired a meaning, and the meaning is doing all the harm while the fact is doing almost none.

You are read by eyes that were never reading the surface, and 1 Samuel 16:7 rules the outward appearance out of the assessment entirely. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a fact about a hand from a finding about a person.

Because here is the thing. A crooked line does not stop an object existing. A slightly off shelf still holds books. A seam that wanders still closes a bag. Nothing that has come off that table has failed to be a thing because of the drift. It has only failed to be neat, and neat was never the requirement.

And your hands are not a measure of you. The steadiness of a hand is not a measure of anybody, and there is no version of the gospel in which God is more pleased with a square corner.

You are not disqualified by the drift, and heaven has never once weighed a person by the straightness of a line. 1 Samuel 16:7 says the LORD looketh on the heart, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to read a person off a surface.

And do not go and buy a jig for it. Do not decide the answer is a device that makes it straight, because that is not freedom either, that is agreeing that the drift had to be fixed before you were allowed to make things.

You have permission to make crooked things on purpose, and this is yours: the seeing that matters was never happening at the level of the line. It is written in 1 Samuel 16:7 that the LORD seeth not as man seeth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a settled way of being looked at rather than a nice thought.

Twenty minutes, and do not straighten it

So here is the ask, and there is one instruction inside it that is the whole exercise.

Tonight, make one thing in twenty minutes. Small, out of whatever is already in the house. Cut something, sew something, draw something.

And do not straighten it. Not during and not afterward. When the drift shows up, and it will show up about a third of the way in, keep going in exactly the direction your hand is taking it.

You are covered while a line goes visibly wrong, and it is already settled in 1 Samuel 16:7 that the LORD looketh on the heart. The Spirit of God is the one who is present at a table where nothing is being trued up.

Do not measure to check. Do not put a straight edge on it at the end.

It will come out crooked, visibly, in a way that anybody would notice. Leave it. Do not trim it to true, do not unpick it, and do not put it away in a drawer where it will not be seen.

You are covered while the drift shows on the finished thing, and 1 Samuel 16:7 is the ground under that. The written word moves the seeing off the outward appearance entirely, and the Spirit of God is present in a front room at nine at night with something plainly crooked on the table.