I Do It Their Way Now

It was a gate latch, which is a stupid small thing, and he stood there with a screwdriver in his hand for about a minute and a half.

There is a way his father hung a gate. Everybody in that valley knew it, it was slightly odd, it was better, and his father had shown him at about eleven years old on a wet afternoon and he has done it that way ever since.

Except he has not. He was standing there having just done it the other way. The way the men here do it. And he could not think of a single day on which he had changed over.

Nobody asked him to. There was no conversation. There has never once been a remark about it, not a joke, not a raised eyebrow, and the men here are good men and half of them would find it interesting if he told them.

It just went. Somewhere in about eight years of working alongside people, a thing that was his father's became a thing he used to do.

And standing in that gateway with a screwdriver he thought about how many other things there are like that. The way he stacks. The way he says a certain word. Something about how he ties a knot that he genuinely cannot now remember the shape of.

He is not upset about a gate. He wants that said, because a man can sound ridiculous about this.

It is more that he did the arithmetic in that gateway and worked out that if that one went without him noticing, there is no way of knowing what else has, and there is nobody left to ask.

You know that gateway.

Maybe yours is practical too. Maybe it is a word, or a way of doing a job, or a thing in a kitchen. Maybe you can name the moment and maybe you cannot, and not being able to name it is the ordinary case.

Nobody has taken anything from you. There is no group here doing anything to anybody. This is simply what working alongside people does over eight years, and it does it to everybody, and mostly nobody notices.

Read the word many

Here is a sentence about a body, and everybody reads the word one in it and almost nobody reads the other one.

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.1 Corinthians 12:12

Many is in there three times.

One body. Many members. All the members, being many, are one body. He says one and he says many in the same breath, four times over, and he never once treats them as being in tension.

That is what a body is. Not a group of similar things arranged together. A set of genuinely unlike parts that are one thing because of what they are joined to, and the unlikeness is not a problem the joining solves. The unlikeness is the reason the joining is worth anything.

You are one of many members, and many is in that sentence on purpose. That is what 1 Corinthians 12:12 says by refusing to choose between the two words (1 Corinthians 12:12), and it is the Holy Spirit who is named a few verses later as the one who divides to every man severally as He will, which means the differences in a body were dealt out rather than tolerated.

This is not an argument against your neighbors

Let me be plain about that, because you would hate this page otherwise.

The men here are good and their way of hanging a gate is fine and it works and there is nothing wrong with it. Half the things you have picked up from them are better than what you came with, and you know which ones.

Nothing here says a group absorbing a man is a wicked thing or that you should have resisted it. Adapting to the people you work with is how anybody gets along anywhere, and a man who refused to pick up anything would be insufferable and would be right about nothing.

You have not been assimilated by anybody, and nobody in that valley has done a thing to you. Scripture says charity thinketh no evil (1 Corinthians 13:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible to notice a loss without producing a grievance about it, which is the whole difficulty of an article like this one.

What is actually gone and what is not

Here is the useful distinction, and it will save you standing in gateways.

The habit is gone. That is true. You do it the other way now and your hands have learned it and hands are stubborn.

The knowledge is not gone. You can still describe your father's way. You just described it to yourself in that gateway in about four seconds, in detail, including the wet afternoon.

Those are two different things, and only one of them was ever lost.

You are still carrying what you were taught, and a habit changing over is not the same as a thing being deleted. The word says only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons (Deuteronomy 4:9), and read what is kept and what is taught, which is the seeing rather than the doing, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings all things to remembrance in a man standing in a gateway.