Not actual people — more like phases.
Dunning grabs a chainsaw. He’s got work to do. Kruger heads straight to finishings — cabinet pulls, paint chips, brushed nickel. Jesus? He picks up sandpaper.
It sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s how most of us enter spiritual formation: one part confident, one part clueless, and — if we’re lucky — one part Christ.
In 1999, two psychologists named David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified something the rest of us already suspected: people who are bad at something are usually the last to know. Not because they’re stupid but because the skill you need to recognize incompetence is the same skill you’re missing. The deficit conceals itself. You can’t hear your own bad accent.
The church has the right diagnosis. It’s always had it — pride, vainglory, the whole tradition. Others have even noted the resemblance to Dunning–Kruger. But the resemblance is more than a sermon illustration. It’s a hermeneutic — a lens from another shelf that shows why the right diagnosis doesn’t reach the people who need it most.
Walk into any Home Depot on a Saturday morning and watch.
Aisle 1: power tools. There’s the guy with a cart full of demo equipment — sledgehammer, pry bar, reciprocating saw. He’s confident. He has a project. He’s already mentally ripping out the kitchen. He doesn’t have a permit, he hasn’t measured anything, and he’s never heard of a load-bearing wall, but he’s got a YouTube video and a 30-amp circuit he’s pretty sure he can tap into. He is not in the wrong store. He is in the wrong aisle — and he doesn’t know it, because his understanding of the project doesn’t require anything he hasn’t already grabbed.
That’s the Dunning phase. You don’t know what you don’t know, and the not-knowing feels like confidence.
Last aisle: finishings. There’s another guy, and he looks great. His cart is full of beautiful things — designer tile, a farmhouse faucet, the cabinet hardware he saw on a renovation show. He demolished the old kitchen last weekend, and now he’s picking out the new one. He skipped framing, leveling, plumbing, and electrical, but he doesn’t know he skipped anything because the project, as he understands it, goes like this: tear out the old, put in the pretty. He’ll install that farmhouse faucet on a wall that isn’t plumb. He’ll hang those cabinets on studs he never checked. It will look finished. It won’t be sound. The latex will peel off the oil-painted trim inside a year. The drawers will be out of true. And he will blame the materials.
That’s the Kruger phase. Just enough competence to produce a result. Not enough to know it’s hollow.
And then there’s the middle of the store. The aisle nobody visits voluntarily.
She’s on her knees in front of the sandpaper display — 60-grit, 120, 220, 400 — reading the backs of the packages. She’s already done demo. She’s already framed. She’s in the part of the project that nobody photographs for Instagram: sanding, fitting, joining, sealing. The slow, invisible, unglamorous work that makes the structure sound. She doesn’t feel like she knows what she’s doing. She’s further along than anyone in the building.
She’s reciting something under her breath. A psalm, maybe. We’ll come back to her.
Here’s the thing about Home Depot on a Saturday morning: it’s a secular temple of self-reliance, and it is full of Dunning–Kruger. The guy in demo doesn’t know about the middle of the store. The guy in finishings doesn’t know he skipped it. And neither of them can see it about themselves — because that’s the whole point of the effect. The incompetence is self-concealing. You can’t want sandpaper if your understanding of the project doesn’t include it.
This is not a metaphor. This is the interior life of most Christians I know, including me.
We come into faith and we do demo. We stop the obvious sins — the lying, the cheating, the cruelty we could see. Big, noisy, satisfying work. Chainsaw repentance. You can measure it. You’ve clocked the Ten Commandments. Congratulations, you’re not robbing banks. You can humblebrag about it: I don’t do that anymore. I’m saved. I’m redeemed. It’s a clearing phase — necessary, good, holy even. But it’s not deep work yet.
And then — because we don’t know what we don’t know — we skip straight to finishings. The right vocabulary. The polished testimony. The curated faith that looks like maturity from the outside. Beautiful hardware on an unsound frame. And nobody tells us we skipped the middle, because the middle doesn’t look like anything from the outside.
Every pastor in the country has a congregation full of people with gorgeous cabinet pulls on walls that aren’t plumb.
This is Dunning–Kruger applied to the soul: the most confident Christians in the room are often the least self-aware, and the people furthest along in formation feel the most lost. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s a cognitive phenomenon with a spiritual corollary. The guy in power tools doesn’t know about the middle. The guy in finishings thinks he’s past it. And the woman on her knees with the sandpaper — she’s the one who feels like she’s failing.
She’s not. She’s in the right aisle. She just can’t know it. That’s the cruelest part of the effect: the person doing the deepest work feels the furthest from done. Every contemplative tradition acknowledges this — the dark night of the soul, the desert, the felt absence of God. Meanwhile the guy in finishings is posting about his blessings.
Jesus taught this shift before anyone had a name for it. In the Sermon on the Mount, he moved the whole jobsite from behavior to motive. Not just murder but hatred. Not just adultery but lust. Not just oaths but the manipulation underneath them. He walked people out of power tools and into the middle of the store, and most of them did not want to go.
Because the middle is miserable. You’re on your knees doing work that feels like it’s going nowhere. Your hand cramps. The dust gets everywhere. You can’t see progress. And the guy next to you just walked past with a gorgeous farmhouse faucet, and you think — what am I doing wrong?
Nothing. He’s the one who skipped.
So what breaks the cycle? What moves someone from the wrong aisle to the right one?
Grace. Not grace as a feeling. Grace as a perceptual upgrade — the moment you gain the spiritual competence to finally see your own incompetence. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just forgive your bad demo work. The Spirit gives you the eyes to see that the project is bigger than demolition and that your beautiful finishings have nothing behind them. Grace is the thing that makes you put down the cabinet pull and pick up the sandpaper.
That’s terrifying. And it’s the beginning of actual renovation.
Now. Back to the middle of the store.
She’s still there. She’s been there the whole time. And if you get close enough, you can hear what she’s saying. It’s David — the king who killed a giant, wrote psalms, committed adultery, and repented in ashes. The most spectacular demo-to-finishings failure in scripture, dragged back to the sanding aisle by grace. She’s reciting him because that’s what Christians do in the middle: they reach for the Psalms when they don’t know what else to reach for. Not performing them. Using them. The way you use a level. A tool for when you can’t tell if you’re true.
“Who can spot their own warped boards?
—Psalm 19:12–14, New International Contractors’ Version
Forgive the grain I’ve sanded wrong, the knots I’ve hidden under varnish.
Keep me from grabbing the power tools when the hand sander would do.
Don’t let the loud stuff drown out what You’re trying to show me.
Let the way I speak — and the way I think when no one hears me —
be square and true in Your sight,
My Carpenter. My Contractor. My Redeemer.
She was saying the truest thing in the building. Nobody heard her. They were all in power tools.
____
With respect to the real David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who didn’t ask to be cast in a parable but whose insight lands prophetically anyway. And who are probably very self-aware and good at home improvement.
Originally published on Mockingbird.
