Every Booklet Went In The Drawer

There is a drawer in this house and you know exactly what is in it.

Every booklet that ever came with anything. Folded, unread, some of them still in the plastic. The one for the thing that was sold years ago. The one for the machine that is now in a landfill. And now this one, which went in there on Tuesday, in the same movement, without a thought.

That drawer is a thirty year habit.

And the habit was never a decision about manuals. It was a decision about a kind of man. The sort of person who reads the instructions is one sort, and the sort who works it out is another sort, and somewhere around nineteen you joined the second group and never left.

And now there is a machine in the kitchen doing something that could probably be sorted in four pages, and the four pages are in the drawer, and you have not opened it.

And the reason is not laziness and it is not pride, exactly. It is that opening it now, at this age, about this machine, feels like conceding something about all the years it was not opened.

You are a man about to learn something and not a man admitting a failure, and opening a manual has never once been a confession about the years it was not opened.

A wise man will hear, and will increase learning

There is a proverb about learning, and the interesting thing is who it assigns the learning to.

A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels. (Proverbs 1:5, King James Version)

A wise man will hear.

Not a foolish man. Not a beginner. The hearing is assigned to the wise one, as a thing wise people do, as the behavior that distinguishes them.

That inverts the whole arrangement in your head. In that verse, taking in information from outside is not what a person does when they are short. It is what a person does because they are wise.

You are doing the thing the verse assigns to the wise rather than the thing it assigns to anybody else, and a man who reads four pages has never once been the man that proverb was warning about. Proverbs 1:5 puts the hearing on the wise man specifically, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in front of a drawer.

And then: will increase learning.

Increase. Which means there was already some. The wise man in that verse is not starting from zero and is not being remedial about anything. He is adding to a stock that is already there.

You are adding to something you already have rather than making up a shortfall, and a man increasing what he knows has never once been a man starting again from the beginning. The written word says increase and assumes an existing store, and the Spirit of God is the one who adds to what a man has been building for thirty years.

And a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels.

Attain is another acquiring word, and counsels is plural and comes from outside. The man of understanding in that verse goes and gets advice, repeatedly, and the verse treats that as the mark of understanding rather than as its absence.

You are able to take instruction from outside yourself and have it count as understanding, and a man reading what somebody else wrote down has never once been a man without any of his own. Proverbs 1:5 makes attaining to counsels the mark of an understanding man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a booklet ordinary.

Four pages, sitting down

Something practical, and it is a limit rather than a task.

Four pages. Not the manual. Four pages, sitting down, at a table, with the machine in the same room.

A whole manual is a project and projects get postponed. Four pages is fifteen minutes and the fifteen minutes is why it will actually happen.

You have fifteen minutes available tonight and that is the entire requirement, and four pages read at a table have never once been a smaller thing to have done than a manual unread in a drawer. The written word puts the hearing on the wise, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a small honest task possible on a Tuesday evening.

And the sitting down matters, which sounds like a detail and is not.

Standing in a kitchen holding a booklet at arm's length while the machine sits there is the posture of a man who has not decided to do this. Sitting down with a mug and the booklet open is a man doing a thing.

The body decides more of this than the mind does, and the body has been refusing for thirty years.

You are able to sit down with something tonight rather than stand over it, and a man at a table with a booklet open has never once been a man who conceded anything by sitting. Proverbs 1:5 treats hearing as the wise man's own action, and the Holy Spirit is the one at the table with a man and a small folded booklet.

And here is what will probably happen, which is worth knowing in advance: about half of it will be obvious, some of it will be for a different model, and one paragraph will explain the thing that has been happening, and that paragraph is what the fifteen minutes bought.