Establish Thou The Work Of Our Hands

Thirty two years.

He can tell you what the trade was like when he started, and what changed in the middle of it, and what it costs now, and what the difference is between a job done properly and a job that will look the same for about four years. He is sixty one. His hands do not do what they did.

He has sat in church for most of those thirty two years. Second Sunday of the month he does the doors.

And here is the thing he said to me, once, out in the yard, not looking at me, in the tone men use when a sentence has been waiting a long time.

He said he has heard prayers for the doctors in the congregation. He has heard prayers for the teachers, and a very good one for a woman going out to work with children in another country. He has heard the students prayed for in September and the retired prayed for at the anniversary.

He said, and I am giving you his words, that in thirty two years nobody in a church has ever prayed for what he does. Not once. Not the trade, not the hands, not a single Sunday.

He was not bitter about it. That is what took the top of my head off. He said it the way you would report the weather. He had concluded, without ever putting it into a sentence until that evening, that his kind of work is simply not the kind of work that gets prayed about, and that this was a fact about the world rather than an oversight.

You may know that yard. There is a whole life you have been living, forty hours of it a week, that has never been said out loud in any room where God was being talked about, and after a while a person stops waiting and starts assuming.

Moses prayed this, and it is about hands

There is a psalm that Moses wrote, and it is the oldest one in the book, and most people know the middle of it because it is about how short a life is.

Almost nobody reads the last line.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.Psalm 90:17

He asks it twice. That is not padding. In Hebrew you say a thing twice when you mean it without qualification, and the thing he says twice is the work of our hands.

Sit with who is praying. This is the man who came down a mountain with his face shining. He had been closer to God than anybody alive. And out of everything he could have asked for at the end of that psalm, he asks God to establish the work of human hands, and then he asks again in case it was not clear.

You have a working life that the oldest prayer in the psalms is about, and it has been about you the whole time. Psalm 90:17 asks God twice to establish the work of our hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a prayer that old and lays it on a man in a yard who thought his trade was not the praying kind.

Look at the word establish. It does not mean bless in the sense of wishing something well. It means: make it stand. Give it footing. Let it hold weight and not be swept off. Moses is asking God to put something under work so that it is not simply a thing a person did and then time took away.

That is a very specific request, and it is exactly the ache in a man who knows most of what he has built will be replaced.

You are asking nothing strange when you ask God to put something under your work. The written word puts that request in Moses' own mouth twice over, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a prayer about hands.

There is an honest half and I will not skip it. Nobody praying for your trade for thirty two years is a real absence and it did real damage, and a verse does not undo three decades of quiet. It should have been said. It was not.

But the reason it was not said is not that God had nothing to say about it. He said it before there was a church for anybody to be overlooked in, and the Holy Spirit has been saying it over your yard ever since. The prayer was already written. It has been in the book you have been carrying to the doors on the second Sunday of every month.

And there is a part in this that is yours to do, and it takes about eleven seconds. Somebody has to actually pray it over your work. It does not have to be from the front. It can be you, in a yard, out loud, at the end of a day.