I had some thoughts yesterday while doing some work uh laying some tile with one of my Children. And um before we get to that, I just wanna sh share a little extra icing on the cake. Sometimes it's good to take a bite of the cake first. Sometimes it's good to eat the icing first. Um I don't really like
cake anyway. So I, I was following my own principle of having a child with me when I do things like this. Um And the main reason I do this is for the benefit of the child, the work almost always goes slower. But um you get the the stacked benefit of not just getting a job done and progressing whatever
it is you're trying to do, but you have quality time with your child and hopefully you impart skills, not just skills that are directly related to the thing you're doing, but you don't realize the the implicit lessons that you teach just by spending time with your kids because things come up or they
see things that you don't even notice and there's a transmission of value. And so I try to take advantage of this and this is one way I prevent regretting the past as my kids grow older. Um So we, we got started and I was starting to lay out, we were joining into an existing area, uh doing a, a relatively
large project piecemeal. And he said, um, don't you want to move that where the, the seam is going to be between these tiles because it won't exactly line up with this other portion. And I said, well, it's technically, it's different area of the house. I don't think it really matters. And then I, I,
I paused and I was like, hm, you know, you're right. And this is my process. I said, what amount of work would it take to do it the way he's suggesting? And it was a minimal amount of work because we really hadn't started yet. We only cut two tiles so far. Um, and then I saw the future and I saw myself
standing there and looking at the work and thinking, you know, without, uh, in this scenario, my son had not suggested the idea. So I'd never had it before, but I had it then and I knew that if he hadn't said that there would have come a day where I was standing there feeling regret. And, um, when you
feel regret, emotions are a really important topic, man, when you feel regret, usually there are different factors that, that influence it, its intensity. And one of the things is how much effort, you've, you've put into going down the wrong path. So if you, if you make a simple mistake, who cares? Like
, if you put an envelope on the wrong shelf, it's like, well, who cares? Just move it. But if you, um, I don't know, we have three tons of rye. That's an odd thing to say, uh, in a shed. And if it's in the wrong place, I mean, moving three tons of hand of Rye by hand is an enormous thing. And then you're
like, oh, my gosh, I'm full of regret because that was a lot of work and it was the wrong thing. So, if you're gonna spend a lot of time and money on something you'd like it to be something that gives you joy when you experience it, not something that gives you regret. Anyway, I went through this very
vivid experience in just a half a second. I said, you know what? You're right, let's do it. And I said, thank you very much and I was so deeply grateful and it's funny. Um, I don't know, I live in a very weird world where I experience more intense feelings than anyone. I know that's a mortal being. I
always have to add that caveat. Um, but I have to use the words that everyone else uses because, although I know a lot of you think that I don't do that and maybe I could be better at that. But, um, because I speak English as a second language. But um anyway, um yeah, so, so there's this deep experience
all the time, but I have to squeeze it into the normal framework. At least if the, if not the normal words and situations, the normal framework, at least it's gotta be tied into what people know. Um So all I could say was thank you. But I had this deep, deep experience of and, and, and this is the funny
thing is that, you know, I've done a few tile projects. I'm decently good at it. I mean, I've done some harder things too and yet this kid who's never done it before made a suggestion in my, my immediate assumption was assume it's right and prove it otherwise. And from a beginner's perspective, just
clobber whatever you were thinking before and then reassemble the whole idea um in an unbiased way, in an impartial way. And I did and he was right and I was so much happier than I would have been if I was right. And it's such a simple little thing, but that is very different from how people tend to
be and it is how we ought to be. And it speaks volumes about the evaluation of putative truth. And it's nice that once you start to learn those principles of evaluating punitive truth, you get practice all day long, every day, all day long, every day, you get an opportunity, opportunity after opportunity
to choose which road you're gonna go and uh it grows, grows brighter and brighter towards a perfect day or darker and darker towards the opposite towards anything else. It's not, it's not a line where brighter and brighter on one side and darker and darker is on the other. It's uh narrow and straightway
and anything else you turn to the left or the right, you fall off just the same as if you go backwards. I don't like the term backsliding, by the way, it's a scriptural term uh in the English translations. But if you look at the words, it's translated from it's rebellion, you're either for him or against
him. There's no other option anyway. So I decided to take a gamble and teach my son instead of just being a gopher, I, I wanted to teach him how to cut tile and that's interesting because he's young. But um i it's almost always the case that I find kids are more capable than we think they are. And so
where you think there's a limit, just test it and see what happens safely, don't give them dynamite but give them an M 80 see what they do with it. Um Firecracker start with a firecracker. Um So anyway, so here's some lessons that, that I noticed um with this because he was able to do it, he cut almost
all of the cuts uh that we ended up using and, and it was a hallway So we had to do a lot of cuts, a narrow space. And, um, all I did was I said here is how to do it. And I showed him and then I, I supervised him doing one cut. I said we're good. And I went inside and he was the cut man after that. And
I came to inspect on two occasions and on both occasions, he was doing it other than the way I showed him and I corrected him for that. Um, but whatever that's, he managed to make all the cuts. But one thing I noticed when I came to check up on him and I was suspicious about this because of the, the
result of the cuts, which it was sufficient, but less good than it could be, um, less good than if I had done it. And I had imparted to him. Exactly my process. So, um, he was scared of the blade and if you've never cut tile before, it's an odd thing when you cut wood, the, the blades flying really fast
. And it's a scary thing and wood can fly out of there and really hurt somebody. You can cut fingers off and it's, it's crazy. A tile saw it. There's no, it's not a serrated blade. It's just a disk that has little bits of diamond in it and it's almost just, it's just a grinder. It's, it's not, it doesn't
move as fast and it's mostly just the momentum of the blade and the grit on the diamonds and it just grinds away the tile. It's slow. Um, so I haven't tried this, but if you were wearing gloves, you could probably touch the blade and no big deal. Um, but anyway, it's, you can get that. All the normal
table saw rules of safety apply, but you can push the limits a little bit more than you ever should with a regular table saw for cutting wood. So I explained this to him and I said, you know, don't put your hands here, whatever you do, don't do this, this or this, but pretty much everything else is fine
. And when I came out, his hands were like way far away from the blade and you really have to push on that thing, keep him kind of close. And so sure enough, the thing was chipping at the end and there'd be a little nub. And, um, so I told him, you know, put your hands where I showed you and, but he
was scared and, um, here's, here's some lessons in this very long winded. What should have been a very short video, um, and the applications to life. That's the important part. If you're scared. If you're scared with a tile saw you, you'll fail even on the simple cuts. Um, and then you'll be unable to
make simple corrections. So when you, when you cut a tile and there's a little knob at the end because you, you didn't quite cut it, cut it quite right. You have to support it as you're pushing it through, which means your hands kind of have to get on either side of the blade. And if you don't do that
, if you're holding it too wide, it's much more likely to snap at the end and then you'll get a knob as long as the knobs on the correct side of the cut, you just pass it over the blade, grind it off. No big deal. But, um, if it's on the wrong side, you just wasted a piece. And the, the important part
is that this is on the most normal of cuts that you have to do a million times when you're laying tile. So how does this apply to normal life if you're scared of the things that everyone has to be able to do, you're, you're not going to engage life anywhere near the way you need to even to have a normal
life. And then when you make mistakes, which are gonna be much more common than they would otherwise be because you're scared, you're half stepping, you're not gonna be able to make the corrections because you're too scared to get close to the blade. He came in a time or two and said, I know this isn't
perfect, but I don't want to hurt myself so I couldn't fix it and I'm like, nah, get back out there and fix it. Right. Second thing, if you're scared, you'll be unable to make the more complicated cuts. So the easiest cut with a tile is like here's the tile and you cut it just down, right down the side
. Right. That's a quick cut. But I don't have another, here's another thing to post it. Notes if you got a longer or wider tile. Right. It's, it's more complicated to do a cut like this, which is called a rip um to rip down the tile because it just takes longer and there are more opportunities to break
it. Um, but the the more complicated cuts, they're a lot more common than you think. So, if all you can do is the normal cuts, you'll never be able to finish the job. And like every room has door frames and edges and things corners. So if you can't do the more complicated cuts, you're in big trouble
. And how does that work with, with life? I mean, there are problems all the time that exceed what we consider to be normal. So it's very normal to have above normal problems. And if you're scared and you're half stepping in life and you never figure out how to do the, how to handle yourself around scary
things around things that obviously have danger, you're in trouble because you'll never be able to complete anything really. You, you can make progress but you'll never complete anything. Now, what about the, the, the ripping you know. So what do, what do I mean by a complicated cut? So, instead of doing
this, you have to like, cut a corner out or something. That's what I mean by complicated on the rips. That's simple. But it takes a lot more time and a little more effort than the normal simple cuts. And what's that like with life? There are so many things that you cannot do in an hour or a day or a
week or a month or a quarter or a year. There are things that take a decade or more of sustained effort. Just like with ripping a tile, you have to pay attention the whole time because in spite of all the time, you've invested, if you mess up right now, which all you need to do is deviate from what you've
been doing. But on the flip side, you, you don't have to do anything new. You just have to stay with it. This is like keeping your weight under control. If you stay with it, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. It just takes constant attention and sustained small effort. But if you let yourself
go for three months or a year or three years now, you've got a really big problem where you literally where you just had a tiny little thing before. And there are many, many, many examples, I'm just using that one not to rip on you. Uh So, you know, at some point, we needed to rip two tiles for the end
of the hallway. And I showed him how to use the fence and he was more comfortable with me doing that. And I said, ok, cool. I mean, you've, you've definitely made a lot of progress today. We'll just let you observe this one mostly just because I was really tired and my back hurt and my knees hurt and
I was hungry and I was ready to be done. So, uh I went ahead and did that. I acquiesced to his request, but then he helped again because I was about to change the fence around and do these other tiles. And he said, don't you want to do this other thing? First? I said 100% you're right on. Thank you for
keeping me straight. Um So that helped us a lot, a lot more than it would have helped for him to do the ripping. And that's, that's actually not on my list here. But I'm just thinking of this. Now, many of you, this is a normal human thing to do. I'm not, I'm not cutting you down. Uh Many of you have
this thought that if you're not superman or superwoman, you can't do anything that's valuable. That is so, so, so false. It is not even funny one of the casualties. It's weird like we have this thought that everyone's the same. Of course, that's not true. And then this other distorted view of um there
are people that are better at some things than others and everyone's different, whatever. But that means that if you're not the best who's ever lived on something, it's not your problem. And also there's nothing you have to contribute. We really need to learn to think in terms of ecosystems and networks
. And so, and that all sounds super complicated. It's not, I I was talking about with my son. He was literally just standing there. That was all. He, at the very end of the project, there wasn't really much more he could do. He was just hanging out for emotional support, but because he knew we weren't
done and that there would be things to do and he was committed credit to him. And so he was, he was watching and it wasn't his job to be in charge of the pro project at all, wasn't his job. It wouldn't have been his fault if something went wrong, it would have been mine. And yet he noticed that the,
when I sent him out to cut one of the tiles that was left, he noticed the fence was still set up and we had one more at the end to cut in place that needed that to be that size. And he came back in and he said, dad, don't you want to cut the other one before we change the fence? Because won't that save
time? I said 100% dude, 100% good job. So I went and I cut that one and then went back to what I was doing. He took off the fence, did the other cuts and we got done. It probably saved us five minutes. So, and the tile was exactly the same size because the fence was already set anyway, back to the list
. So, don't, don't underestimate what you can contribute in a network. You don't have to be, you know, Paul talks about heads and feet and different parts of the body and we're all part of the same body, whatever the thing is, it doesn't matter if we're talking about making ice cream or whatever. Um
, or the biggest things in the world, the very, the kingdom of God itself, it, you don't have to be the head to have a very important impact. It all matters, it all matters. So there's that. And finally, um there are what I would call complex cuts and that's when like you have a, I don't know, something
jutting out into a tile and you have to cut a U shape or like a really long narrow shape or something like something intricate that you have to cut and maybe you can't cut it by sliding. There's probably a better way of doing this because I'm not a professional, but I, I figured out that you can cut
those U shapes. It's, it's typically what you do with the U shape. If, if, if this is the shape, you're cutting out of a larger tile. You know, you can cut in here and here and then just run the saw up on here a billion times and cut this out. But I noticed that once you've cut here and here, if you
turn this thing up like this on the saw, you can see where the blade is through the cracks. And so if you just hold the tile over the saw and push down, the blade will pop up right here and then you just keep pushing down and it cuts more and more away. And it, it, it looks, um, looks like a magic trick
, but it works. So that's a complex cut. And that, you know, I didn't ask my son to do any of those we had to do at least two of those for this project. It might have been more. And uh, if you're scared of the blade, you'll absolutely never do those. Right. So there's a difference between safety and
fear. S safety is just a rational consideration of the, of how to mitigate the danger. But danger and opportunity, they always cour it's the opposite sides of a pendulum, the same pendulum. And that pendulum is called risk. Risk is a word that we like many that we um reduce the definition down to one
of its many senses. And so when you hear risk, you think danger, they're not synonyms and few people know this um in risk is both opportunity and danger. And if you don't think this is relevant to the gospel, I don't know what planet you're on. It's all about improvement, right? Which is opportunity
, but it cannot occur without danger. And so this is a long rambling video. But um these things cour and you have to learn how to maximize the one while minimizing the other. You have to take away from the danger side, mitigate it and that's how you get the greatest improvement. So if you're scared of
the blade, you can't cut the two apart. And so much of the gospel is about cutting, about separating things that were thought to be the same before I could talk for hours about that. I have so much about it to say it's so important. You know, you, you think, you think that good things come from above
, actually, that's a point in and of itself. Most people think good things are here below but turns out good, always comes from above. So let's say that you've adopted that great. You're, you're moving ahead of the crowd, but you think what it is is God just keeps giving you good things. Here's another
basket of good things like one of those uh those uh vegetable boxes that people have on a subscription and you get it and you're like, wow, but in reality, it's actually more like that, that vegetable box in one way and less like it in another because no one eats those vegetable boxes. They want like
one thing out of the whole box and they throw the rest away. Well, when the good comes from above, you never throw away what's in the box because it's always better than anything else that you already have. But what you do need to do is you need to go into your pantry and see what can't coexist with
that good stuff and throw that away. That's one form of this cutting away that, that I have and will talk about very much anyway. So you can't be afraid of the blade. I've said many times how the presence of the Lord can be a terrible thing or a glorious thing. The sword of truth is double edged, no
matter where you point that thing, one of the blades is pointing toward you and it has to be that way. If you want more good, you're going to get more bad. And so part of the gospel, it's not just getting more good. It's becoming better at dealing with the bad. They have to go together. So that's your
reward for hanging with me. For those of you who like man, he's off his rocker, just rambling on this one. So thanks for hanging in there. All right, let's finish this idea with the complex cuts. So every project is gonna have one or two of these. So there's simple cuts galore. There's complicated cuts
more than you think there's a couple of cuts where you have to rip it down and it just takes a long slog of sitting there for like what seems like hours just sitting there getting pecked in the face with these flecks of ceramic as they fly off the, the blade. And then there are uh complex cuts and there's
gonna be one or two per job. You cannot overcome all things unless you can make complex cuts. And a beginner can't do it alone. Only Jesus can show you the way. And even when he uses servants to teach you these things, it is so obviously purely from him. He is the only one who learned these things. The
rest of us, we just hear it from someone else, including from him. But I'm saying he's the one that figured it out. He's the one that solved the puzzle. We're just teaching other people how to do it. No one other very important idea about these complex cuts very frequently. They break as you're making
them. It's this jigsaw puzzle, crazy piece that you're making and very frequently they break as you're making them. Now they take way longer to do than many, many, many other tiles and they break. So it's exponential fancy that how long it takes is exponential. It's just one tile, it's just one tile
, but it's equivalent to many other tiles in the time it takes. And the skill is, is greater than them. All these are very important properties and it's going to break more often and that's ok. You try for it not to happen, but when it breaks it's ok, you make another one and every time you make another
one, unless you're really, really tired and your back hurts and your knees hurt, it'll be better than the one you made before. I said it before. I'll say it again. God can only communicate to us through the limits up to the limits of our language. Part of the tremendous blessings that He has given us
is that this creation is full of vocabulary, it far exceeds what can fit into words. And just as he is the word and he is much greater than any words in between those two things are all of his creations and they serve as a vocabulary of light. And so one property of having light is being able to see
the light and you can use the light to communicate what was previously unseen. So you, you bring light to the darkness. So don't take for granted all the situations around you because when you open your mind to the to the volume, the true vol volume or a truer idea of the volume of the love that the
Lord has. You realize in every moment of every day, he's trying to show you something, every moment of every day. The full measure of the message is he's saying I love you, but you can't understand that until he explains a million other things. And even then he just keeps piling it on because he's never
done. You'll never get there. So one of those things is understanding how things are related. Another one is understanding what they're worth. Another is to understand more accurately how people are and on and on and on and he can use everything around you to teach you about this. So I hope some of these
have been valuable things to think about. But more than that, I hope that this encourages you to be more aware of what he might be able to teach you through your normal experiences. If you just open your mind and your eyes a little in your heart, a little more.