Moses Looked At All The Work

Nothing she has ever made would be photographed.

That is the honest description of her working life and she says it without much feeling. Her work is functional. It exists to do a job. It is well made, it lasts, it does not draw attention, and if it is doing what it should then the highest compliment available is that nobody thinks about it.

She has a cousin who makes beautiful things. Genuinely beautiful. People stop.

There is no rivalry there at all. She loves her cousin and she is proud of her and she has one of her pieces on the wall.

But there is a thought, and it comes maybe four times a year, usually at the end of a long week, and it goes like this: God made the world and He made it beautiful, and beautiful is clearly something He cares about, and the things I make are not beautiful, and so I am somewhere further down.

She has never said that to anybody. It would sound like fishing. And it is not really a grievance, it is more like a settled understanding of where she is in an order she never agreed to.

You may have your own cousin on the wall. Something you make that works, and does not shine, and a quiet arithmetic you have run about what that means to God.

He looked at all of it

Here is the moment at the end of the whole tabernacle build, and I want you to read what got inspected.

And Moses did look upon all the work, and, behold, they had done it as the LORD had commanded, even so had they done it: and Moses blessed them.Exodus 39:43

All the work.

Not the impressive parts. Not the gold, not the embroidery, not the things a person would stop at. All of it, which by that point included the tent pegs, the loops, the sockets, the bars, the coverings of badger skin over the top that were there to keep the rain off.

And the sentence does not sort them. There is no line where the finer items are received warmly and the functional ones are acknowledged. He looked upon all the work, and he blessed them.

You are inside a blessing that was pronounced over all the work and did not sort it by beauty. Exodus 39:43 has Moses looking at everything and blessing the makers with no distinction drawn, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page about a tent and lays it on a woman whose work would never be photographed.

Now think about what the tent pegs were for.

They held the whole thing down. In a desert, in wind. Without them the beautiful part is on the ground in the morning. Nobody wrote a psalm about a tent peg and God specified them anyway and Moses looked at them and blessed the people who made them.

You are not further down an order, and the order you have been carrying is not in the text. The written word blesses all the work without ranking it, and the Holy Spirit has never once shown me a page where the useful things are received more coolly than the lovely ones.

Here is the honest half. Your work still will not be photographed, and your cousin's still will, and nothing here changes that, and I am not going to tell you your work is secretly beautiful, because you would hear the kindness in it and know it was a dodge.

The correction is not that your work is beautiful too. It is that beautiful was never the measure being applied.

And there is a part only you can do. One plain thing has to be named out loud and blessed, by you, in the ordinary words that actually describe it, so that the blessing lands on the thing as it is and not on a nicer version of it.