The Boards Behind The Curtain

Nobody will ever see it. That is not a complaint, it is a specification.

The thing he makes sits behind other things. It holds them up. If it is done well the result is that nothing happens, ever, and no one has an opinion. If it is done badly the result is also that nothing happens, for about two years, and then something does, and by then nobody will connect it to him.

He is twenty nine. He has been doing this for six years and he is unusually careful.

And what he told me, in a storeroom, holding a clipboard, was that he has started to think of himself as the understudy of his own trade.

The visible people, whose work has a face on it, are doing the real version. He is doing the part underneath. And he cannot even be resentful about it because the arrangement is entirely sensible: somebody has to do the underneath, and he is good at it, and he chose it.

But there is a small persistent voice, and it turns up most often when he is doing something well that nobody will ever inspect, and it says: why exactly are you being this careful.

He has never had an answer for it. He is careful anyway. He just does not know why, and not knowing why has slowly become its own kind of tiredness.

You may know that voice. There is a part of what you do that is permanently out of sight, and you keep it to a standard that nobody enforces, and you have never worked out what that standard is for.

God specified the boards

Here is something I want to put in front of you, and it takes about a minute to see and then it does not leave.

When God gave the instructions for the tabernacle, He gave measurements for the things everybody would see. The lampstand. The table. The gold. All of it described in detail.

And then He did this.

And thou shalt make boards for the tabernacle of shittim wood standing up.Exodus 26:15

Boards. Frames. Structure. The dull load bearing part that stands upright and holds the whole thing off the ground. God specifies their timber, their length, their width, their sockets, their bars and the rings the bars pass through, in the same voice and at the same level of care as He specified the gold.

Nobody was going to see those boards. They were behind the curtains. Their entire function was to hold up the thing people would look at.

And they were made to the standard, by God's own instruction, and He put the instruction in the book.

You are working to a standard God Himself set for the parts nobody sees. Exodus 26 gives the boards their timber and their measurements as carefully as the gold, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page about a tent and puts it in a storeroom with a clipboard in it.

So the answer to the voice is not that you are being unnecessarily careful. The answer is that careful is what the unseen part is supposed to be, and it is supposed to be that because of what it holds up, and God said so first.

You have been keeping a standard that has God's own reasoning behind it, and you have kept it without ever being told why. The written word describes the frames in the same detail as the lampstand, and the Holy Spirit has been the reason that voice never actually stopped you.

I want to be careful about one thing. This is not a promise that somebody will eventually notice. They very likely will not. That is what unseen means, and dressing it up as delayed recognition would be a small lie in a place that cannot afford one.

The point is different and better. The standard is not held up by being seen. It is held up by what the work is for, and the One who set it knows exactly what is behind the curtain.

There is an honest half too. Doing careful work in permanent obscurity is genuinely wearing, and the wear is real, and no verse takes tiredness away. But there is a difference between being tired and being unaccounted for, and you have been treating the first as evidence of the second.