Then I Saw What Good Actually Looks Like

You were enjoying it. That is the part worth holding onto.

For about eight months you had a thing you did on a Tuesday. It was not good, and you knew it was not good, and it did not bother you in the slightest, because the whole point was the hour and not the object.

And then one evening you watched somebody who was excellent.

Not a friend. A stranger, on a screen, with better light and better tools and twenty years of practice compressed into eleven minutes. And it was beautiful, and you watched three more, and something happened while you were watching that you did not consent to and could not have stopped.

The bar moved.

Not by a bit. It jumped to a place you had no relationship with an hour earlier, and when you looked back at the thing on your own bench, it had changed. Nothing physical happened to it. It was the same object. But it was now a bad version of something rather than a thing you had made.

And you have not been out there since.

I want to name what actually happened, because I think you have been calling it something else. You have been calling it losing motivation, or realizing you were kidding yourself. That is not what happened.

What happened is that you were given a comparison you had not asked for and had no way to refuse. And the comparison was not even honest, because you compared your Tuesday to somebody's edited best, and your beginning to their middle.

They are not wise

Paul writes something to Corinth about comparison, and it is worth reading because he does not call it a weakness. He calls it foolish, which is a stronger and kinder word.

For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. (2 Corinthians 10:12, King James Version)

Measuring themselves by themselves. Comparing themselves among themselves. Are not wise.

Notice he does not say they are proud, or bitter, or lacking faith. He says the activity itself is unwise. It is a bad instrument. It does not measure the thing it appears to measure, and using it produces a number that means nothing.

You have been using a broken instrument, and 2 Corinthians 10:12 calls the whole practice unwise rather than calling you weak. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written into a church argument and lays it on a man who has not been out to his bench since a Thursday in the spring.

And there is mercy in the way he puts it. If the fault is in the activity, then the man is not the problem, and a man can put an instrument down.

You are able to put the measuring down, and it is already settled in the written word that the wisdom is in refusing it rather than in winning it. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has quietly concluded something about himself.

Your Tuesday against their eleven minutes

Now let me do the arithmetic of that comparison, because seeing it laid out does something.

What you watched was: twenty years of practice, professional tools, a workshop built for it, work done off camera, several attempts you never saw, and eleven minutes cut out of a much longer day, lit properly and edited for pace.

What it got compared to was: one man, on a Tuesday, in whatever light the porch has, at the beginning, in real time, with everything visible including the bit that went wrong.

You were never in a contest at all, and 2 Corinthians 10:12 calls the comparing itself unwise rather than calling the work poor. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a broken instrument out of a man's hand.

Those two things are not in the same category. It is not a close contest and it is not a distant one. It is not a contest, because only one of them is a thing that actually happened in a room.

And more than that, what came off your bench is not a measure of you and never was. It was an hour on a Tuesday that you enjoyed, and enjoying it was the whole of what it was for.

You were never in competition with anybody, and heaven has never once graded a man's Tuesday against a stranger's best work. 2 Corinthians 10:12 calls comparing among ourselves unwise without exception, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the instrument out of a man's hand.

And here is the thing to head off. Do not go and try to close the gap. Do not decide the answer is better tools, or a course, or doing it properly this time. That accepts the comparison and just changes your position in it.

You have permission to go back to exactly the standard you had, and this is yours: the eight months you enjoyed were never disqualified by an evening of watching. It is written in 2 Corinthians 10:12 that the measuring itself is unwise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a release rather than a rebuke.

Twenty minutes, and no screen

So here is the ask, and there is a hard condition on it.

Tonight, go out and make something for twenty minutes, at exactly the level of last spring. Not better. The same.

And no screen. Not before, not during, not to check how something is done, not to see what it should look like. Leave the phone in the house.

You are covered while you work at exactly the level you had, and it is already settled in 2 Corinthians 10:12 that no exception was made for a good video. The Spirit of God is the one who is on a back porch with a man and no phone.

That is the whole condition and it is not incidental. The comparison did not come from your bench. It came in through a screen, and it will come again the moment one is open.

What you make will be at your level, which is to say not good. Leave it that way. Do not go and look up how to improve the part that went wrong, tonight or this week.

You are covered while it comes out exactly as poor as it was in the spring, and 2 Corinthians 10:12 is the ground under that. The written word names the comparing as the unwise thing rather than the work, and the Spirit of God is present on a back porch with a man who has not been out there in months.