The Afternoon They Switched It Off

Six of them round one screen at four in the afternoon, and somebody has brought a cake, which is what people do when they cannot think what else the occasion needs.

The thing they are switching off has run every night for fifteen years. It never had a name anybody outside the building would recognize. It quietly did one job, over and over, at two and three in the morning, for people who never once wondered whether anything was doing it. Martin built it. He was thirty five, and he sat up for a fortnight to get one part of it right, and he can still tell you which part.

The countdown is not dramatic. Someone says "shall I?" and someone else says "go on then", and that is the whole ceremony. There is a small cheer. The cake is cut with a plastic knife that is not up to it. Everyone is genuinely happy, because the new one is better and Martin knows it is better and he helped choose it.

He stands at the back with a paper plate and he is not sad exactly. He is doing a sum. Fifteen years, gone in an afternoon, and behind that one the previous one, and behind that another, and if he lines them all up honestly then every single thing he has ever made is either already switched off or will be inside ten years. Fifty years old, and the whole visible output of one life has a shelf life shorter than a decent kitchen.

If you make things for a living, you have stood where he is standing. Not at a funeral. At a cake. And underneath the paper plate there is a question with no floor under it: if all of it goes, what exactly is left of me?

What Was Made First

I am not going to tell you your work does not matter. That is the cheap move, and it is not true, and you would be right to close the page.

The fifteen years mattered. The nights it ran while a town slept mattered. The fortnight to get one part right mattered, and it mattered to God, who is on record as filling a man with His own Spirit for the express purpose of making things well with his hands. Bezalel was not given wisdom for preaching. He was given it for cutting stone and working metal and joining timber, and Scripture troubles to say so.

So we are not solving your ache by demoting the work. We are going to put something underneath it.

Here is the sentence, and it is the one this whole page is built on.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

Read the order of that, slowly, because everybody reads it backwards. Most of us hear a verse about the works we are supposed to produce. Look again at what is standing in the subject position.

We are the workmanship. Not the output. Us. The made thing in that sentence is the person, and the good works come afterwards, and they were got ready in advance by somebody else anyway, so even they are not the reader's invention.

Take that now, before we go on, because it is the thing that ends the sum you have been doing with a paper plate in your hand. You are His work before you are the author of anything. That is not encouragement I have improvised to make you feel better; it is what is written, in that order, and it is the Spirit of God who takes an old sentence like that and lays it against a fifty year old man in an office at four in the afternoon so that it lands as fact rather than as a nice thought.

And notice what that does to the shelf life question.

Everything you make has a shelf life. So does everything anybody makes. The tabernacle craftsmen made the most carefully specified objects in the history of the world, filled with the Spirit for the purpose, and every one of those objects is gone. Not one board, not one clasp, not one of Bezalel's joints survives anywhere on the earth. If durability of the output were the measure, the man God chose personally scored zero.

Nothing in that makes his fortnight pointless. The work was real, it was received, it did what it was for, and God filled a man to do it. It simply was never the thing that made him worth something.

Now, the harder half, and I want to say it gently because I suspect it is closer to the bone than the shelf life is.

When a person is very good at something for a long time, the skill quietly moves house. It starts out as a thing you can do and it ends up as the place you keep your worth, and the move happens so slowly that nobody notices signing for it. Then one afternoon somebody says "shall I?" and presses a key, and you find out where you had been living.

You are not being told off for that. It is what competence does to almost everybody, and the fact that it happened to you is not a character failure and Scripture does not treat it as one.

But hear where you actually live. You have a standing that was never issued on the strength of your output, and it does not fluctuate with what is running tonight. Ephesians says the making of you happened in Christ, and His Spirit is the one who holds that steady in a person on the afternoon their best thing is switched off.

So both halves stay, and Ephesians 2:10 holds them both. The work is real and worth doing well tomorrow morning. And you are not the sum of it, and you never were, and the sum you were doing behind the cake was not arithmetic. It was a man asking whether he still exists at five o'clock. He does.

You are His workmanship, and that was settled before the thing on the screen was ever built. Ephesians 2:10 calls us his workmanship and puts the good works downstream of the making, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that order right in a room with a cake in it.