The Thing You Were Good At At Eleven

She was eleven, and she had taken the back off the radio.

Not to break it. She wanted to see the reason it made the noise. Her mother came in and there were eleven small screws on a saucer in a particular order and the child was entirely somewhere else, and did not hear the question the first time or the second.

That happened a lot. There was a summer with a bicycle. There was the winter she rebuilt the doll's house nobody had wanted since she was six, and made the stairs work, and made them work properly, with a rail.

It was called being good with her hands, and it was said fondly, and it was also said in the tone you use for a thing that is charming now and will pass. Nobody was unkind. It simply never occurred to a single adult in that house that the absorbed silence of a child with eleven screws on a saucer was anything other than a phase, or at best a temperament.

She is thirty six now and she makes things for a living, and she is very good, and here is the strange thing she has never once said out loud.

She thinks the ability is an accident.

Not luck exactly. More like eye color. Something about how she happened to come out, no more meaningful than being tall. She believes God loves her. She has never for one second believed that God gave her the thing she is best at.

You may have your own saucer of screws. Something you were doing at eleven, absorbed, that everyone treated as a charming phase, and that you are now doing forty hours a week, and you have never asked where it came from because it did not seem like the sort of thing that comes from anywhere.

Where it came from

There is a verse about a room full of skilled people, and I want you to see what it says about the source of the skill.

Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any manner of work, and of those that devise cunning work.Exodus 35:35

Read the first three words again. Them hath he filled.

Not them hath he permitted. Not they happened to be good at it and God made use of them afterwards. Filled. The ability itself is being traced back to a hand, and the hand is His, and Scripture says it plainly about engravers and weavers and people who devise things.

And then look at the last phrase: those that devise cunning work. That is the person who thinks up the how of it. The one who sees where the joint should go. The child with the screws in order on a saucer.

You have an ability that came from Him, and it is not an accident of how you happened to come out. Exodus 35:35 says God filled them with wisdom of heart to do every manner of work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that from a page about a tabernacle and puts it over a girl who took the back off a radio.

I want to name why this matters, because it sounds like a small correction and it is not.

If the ability is an accident, then it is yours, and it is yours alone, and every day you are proving that the accident is holding up. That is exhausting in a way that is hard to describe to anybody who has not lived it. But if it was given, then it is not a fluke you are maintaining. It is a thing put into you by Somebody, and the One who put it there is still there.

You are not maintaining a fluke. You are carrying something that was placed in you. The written word says He filled them with wisdom of heart for the work, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw and leave a person alone with a talent to defend.

There is an honest half. Nobody in your house saw it, and that is a real loss, and no verse rewrites the years. Some of what you can do you found out on your own, at some cost, and you were not helped much. That happened.

But not being seen by the people in the room is not the same as not being given. Those are two different sentences, and you have been reading the first one as though it settled the second.