A Teacher Wrote Him Off and He Built His Whole Life Around It

He can tell you what the word was and who said it and where he was sitting.

Sixth grade. She was not being cruel. She said it to another adult in a tone that suggested she was being realistic, and realistic from an adult about a child is worse than cruel, because cruel can be argued with.

He is thirty six now. Here is how much of his life is arranged around that word.

He does not take the promotion that has a written component. He leaves a room when a form comes out and comes back when it is filled in. He has a specific way of laughing when a conversation goes somewhere technical, which he developed on his own and has never described to anybody.

He runs a crew of nine and they are good and he is the reason they are good. And he could not tell you how those two facts fit together, because one of them is what he does and the other is what he is, and they have never met.

God says what He goes looking for

There is a sentence in Corinthians that is not gentle and is not meant to be.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. (1 Corinthians 1:27, King James Version)

Hath chosen. That is a selection, not a consolation.

Paul is not saying God makes do with people the world overlooks. He is saying God goes for them on purpose, and that the purpose is to embarrass a ranking system.

And read the verse before it if you can. Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. He is describing the actual composition of the room.

You are the category He said He picks on purpose. 1 Corinthians 1 says hath chosen rather than hath accepted, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old sentence about selection reach a man who leaves the room when a form comes out.

A council could not explain two men in front of them

There is a moment in Acts where the most educated body in the country is trying to work out what it is looking at.

Two fishermen have been arrested and are answering questions, and the record says this:

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13)

Unlearned and ignorant. That is the council's assessment and Luke writes it down without arguing.

Then they marveled. The educated men in the room could not account for what they were hearing from the uneducated ones.

And the explanation Luke gives is not that the fishermen turned out to be secretly clever. It is that they had been with Jesus.

You are not held back by an assessment somebody made of your schooling. Acts 4 records the assessment and then records the room being unable to explain what it saw, and it is His Spirit, poured out on those same men a chapter earlier, who is the reason for it.

The one thing you are told to ask for, without a lecture attached

There is an offer in James that has one clause in it people almost never notice.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. (James 1:5)

Upbraideth not.

That means without scolding. Without making you feel it. Without a sigh, or a look, or a tone that says you should have known this already.

Whoever wrote that knew exactly why a man does not ask. It is never the not knowing. It is the face on the other person when you admit it.

And the offer specifically rules that face out.

You are given wisdom by somebody who does not make you feel it for asking. James 1 puts upbraideth not right in the middle of the offer, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old promise feel usable to a man who stopped asking questions in the sixth grade.

Paul says what a believer already has

At the end of a long section about who can understand what, Paul lands somewhere blunt.

For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:16)

We have. Present tense.

He is not describing an upgrade to your intelligence. He is describing access. It is a different thing from being clever, and it is not distributed according to a school report.

And a few verses earlier he says the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God, and that the things freely given are known that way rather than worked out.

You have access that was never issued on the basis of a test. 1 Corinthians 2 says we have the mind of Christ in the present tense, and it is the Spirit named a few lines earlier who is described as doing the searching.

And the promise about understanding names who it is for

There is a line in the long psalm about God's word that says exactly who gets the light.

The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. (Psalm 119:130)

Unto the simple.

Not to the trained. Not to the qualified. The word in there means uncomplicated, plain, the ordinary person with no equipment.

And the light is at the entrance. It is at the door, not at the end of a course.

You are the person the light was specifically promised to. Psalm 119 names the simple and puts the light at the entrance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise about reading feel like it applies to somebody who has been avoiding paper for twenty years.