I Decided It Was Luck

The best thing you ever made, you have decided was a fluke.

You say it every time it comes up. That one just came out right. I could not do it again. Everything went my way that week. I still do not know what happened there.

And the consequence of that decision is exactly what you would expect, and you have never connected the two. You have not attempted anything like it since. Why would you. You cannot repeat an accident.

So the best work of your life is sitting in somebody's house, and in your own account of yourself it belongs to a good week and not to you, and you have spent eleven years since then making things that are careful and smaller.

I am not going to tell you that you are talented, and I am not going to turn this into a lesson about humility, which would take the good thing straight back. I am going to show you a verse about where good things come from, and what it does not say.

Every good gift is from above

There is a sentence in James about the origin of good things, and the useful part is the word it uses.

He is writing about what comes down and from where, and the word is not chance.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17, King James Version)

You were given something, and what came down that week has never once been chance. James 1:17 calls a good thing a gift and names the giver rather than leaving it to a good run, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a barn doorway with a finished piece propped against the wall.

Look at what is being ruled out. Not your effort. Chance. The verse does not say every good thing is an accident of timing, it says it is a gift and it has a source, and the source is named.

And look at the last clause, because it is the one that undoes your account. No variableness, neither shadow of turning. Which means whatever came down that week did not come from a rare alignment that has since drifted.

You have a source that does not drift, and it has never once been a good week that made that piece. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a sentence about lights and shadows reach a man looking at the best thing he ever built, and James 1:17 names a giver who does not vary.

What luck lets you off

Let me say what the word luck is doing for you, because it is doing something.

If it was luck, nothing is expected. You cannot be asked to do it again, you cannot be measured against it, and nobody can be disappointed. Luck is the safest possible account of a good outcome, and it costs you the outcome.

You were never lucky, and the word has never once described what happened in that shed. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what a word has been buying him, and the written word calls every good thing a gift with a named source in James 1:17.

And there is a second thing that is simply true and needs saying plainly. You were there. Whatever was given, the hands were yours, and you made about four hundred decisions that week, and you can still remember two of them.

A gift that arrives through a man's hands does not stop being a gift, and the hands do not stop being his. Both of those are in the verse and neither one is embarrassed by the other.

You are able to name a gift and a hand in the same sentence, and neither one has ever once canceled the other. His Spirit is the one who lets a man own what he did without claiming what he did not, and James 1:17 names the giver without deleting the recipient.

Say both, and name one thing

So here is the exercise, and it has two parts and you will want to skip the second.

Look at the best thing you ever made, or a photograph of it, and say out loud that it is good and that it was given.

You are able to say that it was given, and saying it has never once meant you were not there. James 1:17 calls every good thing a gift from a Father who does not vary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes both halves possible for a man who has said fluke for eleven years.

Then name one thing you actually did. One decision, one judgment, one moment where you chose the harder way. Say it out loud. I got the proportion right on the top rail. I did not rush the drying. I went back and redid the second one.

That second part is the one that will stick in your throat, and it is the part that ends the eleven years, because a man who can name one thing he did can attempt something like it again.

You were never claiming anything by naming one decision, and one decision has never once been a boast. The Spirit of God carries a man past a word that let him off, and the written word names a giver with no shadow of turning in James 1:17.