A Stool You Can See The Whole Of

On Wednesday evenings he goes to a woodwork class in a school craft room that smells of glue and floor polish. There are eight of them, mostly people twice his age, one tutor who says almost nothing and puts a hand on your work at the exact moment you were about to ruin it.

He is making a stool. Three legs, splayed, a scooped elm seat. It has taken him seven weeks and it is not perfect. There is a shoulder on one of the joints that he knows about and nobody else ever will.

And here is what he cannot explain to his wife about why he keeps going, out on a wet Wednesday, when he already works with his hands all day. It is this. For two hours in that room he can see the entire thing. Where the wood came from. What it will be. Whose kitchen it will sit in, because it is going to his mother, and she will put a plant on it and never once sit on it, and that is fine. Beginning, middle and end, all of it inside two hours a week and one pair of hands.

Then Thursday morning comes.

He is very good at the work he does for a living. Fifteen years good. He builds the quiet machinery underneath things that other people use without ever thinking about it, and thousands of strangers will pass through what he makes, and he will not meet one of them. He is proud of it, in the ordinary way a person is proud of doing a thing well. And somewhere around the middle of an ordinary Thursday, every few weeks, a thought comes down on him like weather.

I am good at this. And I am not always sure what it is being used for.

Not because anything is obviously wrong. That is the strange part, and it is why he has never said it out loud to anybody. It is that his hands end at a certain point and the thing goes on without him, into decisions made in rooms he is not in, by people he will never meet, for purposes nobody explains to him. He can see the whole of a stool. He cannot see the whole of his working life, and he never will.

The river and the length you dig

Land teaches this one better than anything else I know.

A man cuts a channel across his own ground to take the water off it. He can dig it well or badly. He can line it, grade it, keep it clear of weed, or he can leave it to silt up and let his neighbor's field flood. All of that is genuinely his, and he answers for it.

And then the water leaves his boundary and goes on for forty miles through country he has never walked, into a river he has never seen, past towns whose names he does not know. He is responsible for his length. He is not the watershed. He was never offered the job of being the watershed, and if he tries to take it, the only thing that happens is that he digs worse, because a man carrying forty miles cannot concentrate on forty feet.

That is not a lowering of the standard. It is where the standard actually lives.

Moses ends the ninetieth Psalm, which is the bleakest thing he ever wrote about how short a life is, with a request that has one word in it doing all the work.

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands.Psalm 90:17

Establish. Not explain. Not reveal to us where it all ends up. He is asking God to make the work of ordinary hands stand, to give it a permanence that the hands themselves cannot give it, in a life that is over quickly. And he asks it twice in one line, because it is the thing he most wants said.

So hear this over you, and let it be Scripture that says it rather than my opinion of your career. You are not the watershed and you were never asked to be. Your length is what was given to you, and the word puts the establishing of it in God's hands rather than in your visibility, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old prayer of Moses land on a man in the middle of a Thursday.

Now let me name the thing that is actually sitting on you, because it is not really uncertainty. It is a low, constant, unspoken suspicion that being good at this makes you complicit in something, and you cannot name what, and you cannot get free of it either, because you cannot see far enough down the channel to be acquitted.

That is a heavy way to live and I do not think you chose it. The old Psalm about who may stand in God's holy place asks for clean hands and a pure heart, and notice that it asks about hands, which are yours, and a heart, which is yours. It does not ask whether you could see forty miles. Nobody has ever been able to.

So here is what is settled while you read this. You have clean hands today if you work honestly today. That is not a lowered bar; it is the actual bar, and it is written that way on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you asking you to answer for rooms you have never been in.

What is yours is genuinely yours, and it is not nothing. Whether you tell the truth about what you have made. Whether you cut a corner nobody will ever find and then live with knowing. Whether you say the awkward thing in a meeting when it is honest to say it. Whether the person newest to the work goes home tonight feeling like a fool. That is your length of channel, and you can dig it beautifully, and God sees every foot of it.

So what do you do with a Thursday and a conscience and a thing you cannot follow to its end?

You speak. Out loud, in your own voice, because that is the appointed means and it always has been. Jesus set the measure of faith so small that the men listening tried to argue Him up, and what He would not move on was that the mountain gets spoken to rather than brooded over (Matthew 17:20). A suspicion you have carried silently for two years is a mountain. It has never once been answered out loud.

You have the standing to answer it. Not because of fifteen good years, and not because of the shoulder on the joint that nobody knows about. Because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture puts the authority of what you speak in Him and not in your record. His Spirit is what carries a spoken word into a real Thursday.

You are answerable for your own length of the work and for nothing beyond it. Psalm 90:17 asks God to establish the work of our hands rather than the whole river it feeds, and the Holy Spirit keeps a conscience on its own ground instead of letting it wander down a channel nobody can see the end of.