It Seems Obvious To Everyone But Me

You have watched people do it.

Somebody picks the thing up, and their thumb goes somewhere without them looking, and the thing they wanted is on the screen. They did not think about it. They were talking to you at the time.

And you have thought: how did they know that. Nobody was told that. There was no announcement. And yet everybody appears to have it and you do not, and after enough years of that you stop thinking it is about information.

You start thinking it is about you.

That is the conclusion I want to get at, because it is the injury, not the phone. Somewhere in the last few years you began to suspect that something in your mind has changed. That you have got slower. That this is what it looks like when a person starts to fall behind, and that it will not stop, and that the next thing will be harder than this one.

I want to put a different explanation in front of you, and I am not offering it to be kind. I think it is simply what is true.

Nobody showed you.

That is the whole of it. The people whose thumbs move without looking were shown, or they were young enough that they pressed everything without fear because they had nothing to lose, and they built it up over years of small accidents nobody was watching.

That is not a better mind. That is a different history.

Even to your old age I am he

There is a sentence in Isaiah spoken to people who were worried about exactly this, and it is startling in how physical it is.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4, King James Version)

Even to your old age I am he.

Four verbs in one line, and they are all about weight. Made. Bear. Carry. Deliver. Not advise, not encourage, not remind. Carry.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say you will keep up. It does not promise that you will remain quick, or that the things you found easy at forty will stay easy. That is not offered anywhere and God does not pretend otherwise.

What is offered is that the one carrying does not change. The same one who made you is the one carrying you now, and the arrangement holds all the way to hoar hairs, which is a plain old word for white hair and nobody in that sentence is embarrassed about it.

You are carried by the one who made you, and it has never once depended on keeping pace with anybody. Isaiah 46:4 promises carrying rather than capability and takes it all the way to old age, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that solid for somebody who has begun to suspect their own mind.

The evidence is already behind you

Here is the thing I want you to do, and it is evidence rather than encouragement, because encouragement will not touch this.

You have learned things since you were fifty. Probably a lot of them.

You learned a new road system when they changed it. You learned how a new machine at work operated, or how the bus timetable was rearranged, or how to manage a condition, or how a bank changed the way it does everything. You learned somebody's medication schedule. You learned to do something on your own that another person used to do.

None of that felt like learning at the time. It felt like coping, so it did not get counted. But every one of those was a mind taking on something new and holding it, and you did most of them without anybody teaching you either.

So the story that you cannot take on new things is contradicted by your own last fifteen years. You are not slow. You are untaught in one particular area, and you have been comparing your untaught area to other people's taught one.

You have already learned things nobody taught you, and the story about your own mind has never once matched your own history. The written word promises carrying to the very end rather than a decline to be managed, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person see their own evidence.

Name one thing

So here is the assignment.

Name one thing you have learned since you were fifty.

Out loud, or on paper. One thing. It does not have to be impressive and it should not be about a phone. A route, a system, a process, an illness, a form of paperwork, a way of doing something that used to be done by somebody who is not here now.

Then say when you learned it, roughly.

That is the whole task, and it is not sentimental. You are producing a counter example to a claim you have been making about yourself, and one real counter example does more to a false claim than any amount of encouragement.

Isaiah 46:4 says even I will carry, and will deliver you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person finds evidence against the thing they have believed about their own mind.

You are able to name something you learned late, and it has never once needed to be impressive to disprove what you have been telling yourself. Isaiah 46:4 puts the carrying all the way to hoar hairs, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody counting up what they have actually done.