Good morning!
It’s opening day at Fenway today. As much as the flowers blooming and the birds returning to nest, the freezing cold home opener means the start of spring for New England. I recommend the chowder to keep warm:
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Practicing
(This will be my last essay for you for a few weeks. Next week you’ll get some poetry, as is my habit during Holy Week.)
This semester our adult Sunday School class at church has been covering stewardship. Let me guess: when you heard that word, you assumed that the real topic was money.
Well, you’re half right. About half of the curriculum covered the topic of stewarding money. The other weeks covered time, health, and this week, skills. I appreciate the time spent on this one, and it reminded me of the necessary (but difficult) nature of practice.
A friend of mine is a successful children’s author full-time. But for decades before that, he told stories to his kids. He did not tell them stories with the hope that they would one day turn into a successful series of bestselling books. He told them stories because that’s what fathers do for their children. They were not polished, finished, epic stories. They were metered out, day after day, with faithfulness and joy.
He likes to say that for every good book you read, the author has filing cabinets1 full of terrible writing that you will never see. Another writer has said that every piece of writing has to start with a crappy2 first draft. You just have to start putting things down. If you wait for perfection to arrive, you’ll never do anything.
The same is true of different skills we have to learn over the course of life. Take hospitality, for example. If having people in your home or starting a fresh conversation with someone intimidates you, it could be that you need a little practice. It’s ok to stumble out of the gates. Just get started! Make the same dish every time you have someone in. Ask a similar question every time to get to know someone. Just practice.
I don’t know where along the line we’ve willingly bought the untruth that you have to be good at something the first time you do it. But I see it everywhere — in myself, my friends, and my children.
Every musician puts in hours of practice behind the scenes, playing wrong notes and struggling to get the timing right. When I hear our church pianists play, I am wrongly under the impression that they never seem to hit a wrong note.3 But the truth is that their skill comes through hours of hidden toil, over years of developing a skill.
To be good at something, you must first be bad at something.
Here’s Julia, the original TV chef, reminding us of this for the kitchen:
“The sky can fall, and omelets can go all over the stove — I’m gonna learn; I shall overcome.” Je m’en fous — “I don’t care.”
For the Anglophiles
I’m sorry that this seems to be a soccer newsletter in recent weeks. Here’s the news of the week: England has a new all-time leading scorer for the national team: Harry Kane. For those of you who are not soccer watchers, this means you get a shoe made out of gold: The Golden Boot. Harry took his daughters down onto the field to receive it.
Reads & Listens of the Week
What We’re Asking for When We Pray for Wisdom: This is a nice little exploration of wisdom: the need for it in our current age, as well as the Biblical concept and understanding of it.
How God Gets our Attention: I loved this interview with Os Guinness about his new book, Signals of Transcendence. There’s an old Celtic idea of “thin places,” understanding them to be the places where earth and heaven almost meet. Guinness’ newest book explores different people’s experiences of these places.
Fascinating: Sotheby’s is set to auction off a Hebrew Bible that’s over 1,000 years old. “It later migrated east to the town of Makisin in what’s today northeast Syria, where it was dedicated to a synagogue in the 13th century. Sometime in the following decades, the synagogue was destroyed and the codex entrusted to Salama ibn Abi al-Fakhr until the synagogue was rebuilt. It never was rebuilt, but the book survived.”
This past week at work was the one week of the year when the entire US team is together in the same room. There are lots of people who work remotely in other cities, so it’s a joy to be together. Here are some ways to Love Colleagues Remotely.
We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves,” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.” - CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain
maybe this should be “hard drives” now?
she uses a different word.
But they usually don’t. They’re really good, you guys.