One More Course Before The First Step

There is a folder in the second drawer of her desk with four certificates in it.

Not printed off a website either. Two of them came in the post. One has a raised seal on it, which she noticed and liked more than she would say out loud.

They are all on the same subject. Which is the subject. The one she has known she was supposed to step into since a Wednesday evening about four years ago, when the thing landed on her so clearly that she wrote the date in the front of her Bible, and the date is still there in blue pen.

So she went and learned about it. Properly.

The first course was eight weeks and she did every reading. The second one was better and harder and she took notes she still refers to. The third was a bit thin, honestly, and she said so on the feedback form. The fourth one finished in the spring.

She can teach on this now. She genuinely could. If you sat her down she could give you the history of it, the four main approaches, where each one goes wrong, and the two questions most people never think to ask.

She has never done it.

Not once. Not a small version. Not a trial run with one person on a Tuesday.

And the strange thing, the thing she noticed in the spring and put away again quickly, is that finishing the fourth course did not make her feel readier. It made her aware of a fifth one.

That is what she is looking at on her screen right now. A fifth one. Twelve weeks. It looks very good.

She is not a fraud and she is not hiding. She is a woman who was taught, correctly, that you should not go off half prepared, and who has never been told where prepared ends.

And you have a folder too. It might be a shelf, or a playlist, or a browser with forty tabs open on one subject. And you know more about your thing than most people who are actually doing it.

The mirror, the man, and the walking away

James gives us one of the plainest pictures in the whole of Scripture, and it is about a man and a mirror.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.James 1:22-24

Notice what the man in that picture does right. He looks intently. That is not a glance. That word is about careful, sustained attention, the way you look at something you are taking seriously.

He is not careless. He is thorough. He is, in fact, exactly the sort of person who takes four courses.

The failure in that sentence is not in the looking. It is entirely in the walking away with nothing changed, and James says the man forgets, which is what happens to everything a person knows but never does.

You have not been deceived about the subject, you have been deceived about the finish line, and those are two completely different problems and only one of them is yours. It is written to be doers of the word and not hearers only (James 1:22), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse a woman has read forty times and finally sets it down inside her rather than in front of her.

Now let us be fair to the studying, because this site will not sneer at it.

The courses were not wasted. Everything true you learned is still true, and God does not throw away four years of an honest woman's attention. Paul studied. Apollos was mighty in the Scriptures. The problem was never that she went and learned; the problem is that learning turned out to be a room with no exit door marked in it, and she kept walking around the room looking for one.

You are already qualified for the small version of this, and you have been qualified since about the second course, which nobody thought to tell you. Scripture says His divine power has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3), which is a sentence about a completed supply, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the One who actually equips a person, not a syllabus.

Here is the mechanism, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Every course ends by showing you the size of the field. That is what a good course does. And a bigger field looks like a bigger requirement, so at the end of each one you are further from feeling ready than you were at the start, which is why the fourth certificate made you aware of a fifth course.

It is not a ladder. It is a treadmill with a very good view.

You are not going to arrive at ready by that road, and you are free to step off it today without throwing away one thing you learned on it. It is written that knowledge puffs up but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1), and it is His Spirit who keeps a well taught woman tender rather than merely informed, which is the whole difference between a person who knows the subject and a person who helps somebody with it.

And the size of the first step, because this is where the fifth course wins if we let it.

The first real piece of this is not the full expression of the thing. It is the smallest true instance of it. One person. One occasion. Twenty minutes. A version so small that four courses is comically more preparation than it requires, which is exactly the point, because that gap is where the four years went.

You have permission to do a version so small it embarrasses your certificates, and it will still be the first time the thing has actually existed. Scripture calls the kingdom a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds, which becomes a tree (Matthew 13:31-32), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing, which is the part no course has ever been able to teach anybody.