Tent making

Not a camper, I am constructing a tent for the first time.

Freed from its ingeniously small packaging, there it lies unfurled in large confusion on the grass.

I read the directions in small print -- and these days directions always come in the Interlinear Version, in at least two if not three foreign languages. This is respectful of diversity.

But it is not respectful of any one particular user. It takes some time to find the directions in English, adding feelings of smallness to already-present feelings of incompetence.

Then the discipline of reading and doing.

Reading and doing: these are two different categories of things. You may be able to read the English. But comprehension beyond words, even words you think you understand -- to doing the actions those words describe -- this is not an easy matter.

In fact I think it takes a lifetime to rectify words with actions.

Even in our native language, what a reader comprehends may not be what the writer meant. What, for example, does the writer mean by "sleeve?" Insert the rod through the hole in the sleeve. I look at the puddle of fabric on the ground and see no sleeves.

Are the sleeves under here? (The puddle has many layers). No.

Is this a sleeve? It doesn't look like a sleeve either. I see only hooks. And so on.

There is a reality "out there" the writer is trying to describe. Gradually I must submit my presumed understandings of things, and all of the meanings to words I have already assigned to the "looks" of things in my previous 55 years of life ... I have to submit all of this to the words on the page; to what the writer meant by those words, not to what I want them to mean.

I cannot freely interpret without boundaries. Because it would not conform to the reality that is out there; the reality that now invites me to participate in its further realization.

It is only after several failures at assigning my own meanings to the reality in front of me that I decide something.

Perhaps I should read through these directions -- chapter and verse. And read them again and again, until I finally see, amidst little dawns of realization, those sleeves that were there all along.

Logos2Go

Matthew 5.18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Acts 18.3 Paul lived and worked with them, for they were tent makers just as he was.

Acts 10.34 ... Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons ...