Four Of Us And None Of Us Know

You looked round the kitchen and did a headcount.

Four adults, or near enough. Two of them technically children and both of them taller than you now.

And none of the four knew what to do about the machine, and that was the moment. Not the machine failing. The headcount.

Because somewhere in a person there is an expectation that a full house contains the knowledge. That in any group of four, somebody knows. And the headcount came back with nothing, and the room went a bit quiet, and everybody drifted off to do something else.

And what arrived in you after that, and it has been sitting there since, is a small fear that is not about laundry at all. It goes something like: nobody is coming.

Not this week. In general. There is no adult behind the adults, and this house contains what it contains, and that is all there is.

You are a household with a gap and not a household of incapable people, and four people who do not know a thing have never once been four people who could not find it out.

Iron sharpeneth iron

There is a proverb about people improving each other, and the picture in it is more useful than the way it usually gets quoted.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. (Proverbs 27:17, King James Version)

Iron sharpeneth iron.

Notice what is doing the sharpening. Not a whetstone. Not a specialist tool brought in from outside. Another piece of iron, which is the same material, with the same properties, and no more inherently sharp than the first one.

That is the picture. Two ordinary pieces of the same stuff, and the edge comes out of the contact between them rather than out of either one having it beforehand.

You are in a room with three other pieces of iron, and a household where nobody arrives already sharp has never once been a household that could not produce an edge. Proverbs 27:17 puts the sharpening between two identical things, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a kitchen after a headcount came back empty.

And notice there is no expert in that verse anywhere.

Nobody is brought in. Nobody is described as already possessing what the other one lacks. The whole mechanism is two similar people in contact, and what comes out of it is something neither of them had alone.

You are not waiting for somebody qualified to arrive, and four people with no expert among them have never once been four people with nothing between them. The written word describes sharpening without an expert in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes four ordinary people into something with an edge.

And there is something honest in the image too, which is that sharpening is not gentle.

Iron on iron makes a noise. There is friction and sparks and it is not a comfortable process, and the proverb includes that rather than hiding it. Four people working out a problem out loud will disagree and go down wrong roads and get slightly irritated with each other.

You are able to do something that involves friction and still be doing the right thing, and four people arguing around a machine have never once been four people getting it wrong. Proverbs 27:17 chooses an image with noise and sparks in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a kitchen where people are talking over each other.

What four people actually have

Something practical, and it is a piece of arithmetic that has not been done.

Nobody in this house knows about this machine. Agreed. But look at what is actually in the room.

Somebody can read carefully. Somebody is good at looking things up. Somebody is unafraid of taking a panel off. Somebody is patient. Somebody has a phone with a camera on it that can photograph the state of a thing before it gets touched.

Those are five capabilities, distributed across four people, and together they are most of what a repair actually requires.

You have almost everything a job like this needs distributed around this kitchen, and a household that lacks one specific knowledge has never once lacked the means of getting it. The written word locates the sharpening in the contact rather than in the expertise, and the Spirit of God is the one who assembles what is already in a room.

Now the practical instruction, and the crucial part of it is out loud.

Get all four of them around it on Saturday. Not one person working while the others come and go. Four people, in a rough circle, at the same time, with the phone propped up and somebody reading aloud.

The out loud is the whole method. Because a person working silently is one brain. Four people talking about the same thing at the same time produce sentences that nobody in the room would have produced alone, and that is the sharpening.

You are able to put four brains on one thing at one time, and a problem talked through out loud has never once been the same problem as one worried at in silence. Proverbs 27:17 puts the edge in the contact, and the Holy Spirit is the one in the kitchen while four people talk over each other.

And if it turns out that it needs somebody, then it needs somebody, and Saturday will have established that in forty minutes rather than over three weeks of nobody looking at it.