Personal essays
On reading the manual before you need it
Attending church
I am not religious in any way and yet last week I attended two church services.
Monday I went to my mother-in-law’s funeral. The service was very nice. The eulogy captured much of her personality - although in the middle of the delivery the priest stood up and started to fuss with things around the altar pulling focus away from memories of the woman whose life we were there to celebrate.
I’m sure it’s petty of me. The priest had begun the service by telling us a little about himself and here we was making it about him again.
I’m sensitive to such things because I tune in most weeks to see my friend Mark’s sermon - and he’s exceptional and does everything to make it about us (and God and Jesus and this week’s reading - but about us).
This week, Mark finished the reading and started a story about trading in his car on a newer model. He spent a few minutes with the salesperson and then drove the car off the lot and picked up his wife and daughter.
They were interested in the features of the new car and asked, how do you do this and how do you do that.
Mark found himself answering, “I don’t know.”
He hadn’t read the manual yet.
Of course he hadn’t. The manual was long and mostly boring and filled with information he didn’t need or knew already. But it also contained the answers to how do you do this and how do you do that.
Mark is a preacher so he was leading his congregation to consider the Bible to be their manual for living their life.
And he was encouraging them to read that manual.
Warning light
Ten years ago Maggie and I were driving home from seeing my mom and a warning light appeared that I had never seen before.
“What’s that?” I asked.
I felt her turn and give me the “how should I know” look.
She reached into the glove compartment and took out the manual and looked it up.
It was one of those warnings where you could still drive but you should probably take it in to be looked at.
One thing I found interesting was that every once in a while Maggie would take out the manual and read through some part of it.
This felt like how Mark was advocating that his group use the Bible.
Sure, come to it when you need it, but once you’ve found it useful, return to it in times that you don’t.
To me, that feels like good advice for learning in general.
Make it yours
One of the things that Mark does with the weekly reading is he takes these words and phrases from so long ago and provides the context where it’s easy to see how these things relate to us.
Maggie read the manual and understood what the warning meant. But she wasn’t sure what it meant in practice.
So, after Maggie found the information about the warning light in the manual, she did a web search and found a lot of posts from owners of this model who had had the light go on. Many of them took their car into the shop and the mechanic couldn’t find anything. Often the light wouldn’t go on when the mechanic was looking.
So I didn’t take my car into the shop.
Over the next couple of weeks we noticed when the warning light went on and when it shut back off.
Sunday, in this particular sermon Mark was encouraging people to do that work for themselves.
They had to be able to look at the manual and see how it related to their situation.
Of course they could wait for Mark or someone else to do that work. They, like us, could probably do a web search.
When it came to the warning light, we understood the experience of people from the internet but when we reread the manual I thought I should take it into a mechanic.
I took it in to my mechanic and he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. He reset some code and the light turned off and stayed off.
But we had read and understood the manual.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 277. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe