I Am Honestly Frightened Of It

You opened the drawer and took the smaller one again.

You have done that for years. The good knife is in there, the proper one, and your hand goes past it every single time and picks up the little one with the worn handle, and you do everything with that.

And the little one is worse. It is blunt, it slips, and it takes four times as long, and some part of you knows all of that and takes it anyway.

I want to say the first thing carefully, because a great many people would say it in a light voice and you have had enough of that.

The fear is real and I am taking it seriously.

I am not going to tell you it is irrational. It is a blade, in your hand, with your other hand right next to it, and being wary of that is not a defect of nerve. And whether something happened once, or whether you saw something happen, or whether it has simply always been there, is not something I need to know for this article.

What I do know is that it is not a small thing, because it has quietly shaped a whole room for years.

That drawer is the reason you do not really cook. Not the recipes, not the time. Everything that is worth making starts with something being cut, and there is a checkpoint at the very beginning of every meal that you cannot get past without a small unpleasant negotiation, and so you go around it, and going around it means the packet or the phone.

The knife is not one item in that kitchen. It is the door into it.

So this article has one thing in it, and it is not a lesson.

I will hold thy right hand

There is a line in Isaiah about a hand being held, and which hand it is turns out to matter.

For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee. (Isaiah 41:13, King James Version)

I will hold thy right hand.

The right hand in scripture is the working hand. It is the one that acts, that fights, that carries, that does the thing. When a person is described by their right hand it is about their capability.

And what is offered here is not that the hand is made stronger, and not that the fear is removed. It is that the hand is held.

Sit with the strangeness of that. Somebody comes alongside and takes the hand that does the work, and holds it, while the work is done.

And then: fear not; I will help thee.

Notice the order, because it is the opposite of how we usually hear it. It is not: stop being afraid, and then you will be helped. The holding comes first. The fear not is said by somebody who already has hold of your hand, and the help is stated as a fact rather than offered as a reward for calm.

That is worth having in a kitchen tonight, and I want to be careful not to make it into a charm.

I am not saying that if you pray, the knife becomes safe. It is a knife and it stays exactly as sharp as it was.

What the verse gives you is who is present at the counter. The fear is not something you have to have defeated before you are allowed to pick anything up. You can be afraid, and pick it up, and be held while you do it, and all three of those are happening at once in that verse.

The hand that does the work is held before the fear is gone, and being afraid has never once had to be defeated first. Isaiah 41:13 puts the holding before the fear not and states the help as a fact, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody whose hand goes past a drawer every time.

Avoidance is what has kept it large

Here is the practical half, and it is about what the last few years have done.

A fear you go around gets bigger, and one you go toward gets smaller. That is not a slogan, it is how fear behaves, and it is the reason this has not faded on its own.

Every time your hand goes past the good knife and takes the little one, something in you receives a message. The message is not neutral. It says: that thing is beyond you, and this is the arrangement we have.

And you have sent yourself that message several hundred times. So the knife has not stayed the same size in your mind; it has grown, quietly, every week, funded by the avoidance itself.

That is why the little knife is not a workaround. It is the mechanism.

And here is the second thing avoidance has cost you, which is larger than the kitchen.

You have added a line to the list of things you are not able to do. Not consciously, and you would never say it that way, but it is there: I am not somebody who can handle that. And a list like that does not stay confined to one drawer. It shapes what a person offers to do, what they volunteer for, what they believe they would be able to learn.

I am not going to make grand claims about what one evening changes. But I will say that the list is real and that items can come off it, and they come off it exactly one way, which is by being done once.

A fear you go around grows on the going around, and the smaller knife has never once been a workaround. The written word holds the working hand and says the help plainly, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has added a line to a list she would never say out loud.

Pick it up, cut one thing slowly, put it away

So here is the assignment, and there is no technique in it.

Pick up the knife, cut one thing slowly, and put it away.

The good one. Out of the drawer, deliberately.

And one thing. Not dinner. One item: a carrot, an apple, half an onion, whatever is in there. Nobody is going to eat this and it does not have to become anything.

And slowly. As slowly as you like. There is no speed anywhere in this assignment and nobody is watching. If one carrot takes four minutes, it takes four minutes.

I am not going to teach you how to hold it. That is somebody else's article and it is not what is in your way. What is in your way is the picking up, and no amount of instruction gets a person past a checkpoint that is about fear rather than about method.

So: pick it up. Cut one thing. And then put it away, washed, back in the drawer.

That last part is deliberate. This is a complete act with a beginning and an end, and it finishes with the knife back where it lives and you having done the whole thing and stopped. It is not the first step of learning to cook and there is nothing scheduled after it.

And you may find your hands are unsteady, or that you are more aware of your left hand than usual, or that you want it over quickly. All of that is fine and none of it is failure. The assignment is not to feel calm. It is to pick it up and put it down again.

And when it is back in the drawer, notice what has changed. Not your feelings, which may be exactly the same. The fact. Tonight your hand went to the good knife instead of past it, once, and the several hundred messages you have been sending yourself now have one that goes the other way.

You are able to pick it up while still afraid of it, and the assignment has never once been to feel calm first. Isaiah 41:13 says fear not while already holding the hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody cutting one carrot very slowly.