They say it kindly. That is what makes it hard to answer.
Marian has been at that church for thirty one years. When the roof leaked she found out why. When the hall flooded she was there at six with a wet vacuum somebody's brother owned. When the new sound gear arrived in nine boxes and nobody could make it speak to itself, she sat on the floor for four hours and made it speak.
And every time, afterwards, somebody says the same sentence. We are so lucky to have Marian, she is just so practical.
Just.
She smiles. She means the smile. These are her people and she loves them and not one of them has ever intended a thing by it.
But she has heard that word with that other word in front of it for three decades, and somewhere in the second decade it stopped being a description of what she does and became a description of what she is. The practical one. The one you get when the thing is broken. Useful. Not deep.
She has never said this to anybody, because saying it out loud sounds like asking to be flattered.
Here is what she actually thinks, at eleven at night, on the drive home, with the wet vacuum in the boot. That God gave other people something and gave her hands. That hands are the ordinary part. That when the real things are happening, teaching, praying, the things that go somewhere, she is in the back room with a screwdriver, and that this is fine, and that it is not the same.
You may not own a wet vacuum. But you know the word. Somebody says it about what you do, and there is a small word in front of it, and you have been agreeing with the small word for years.
What God called it
Here is a verse about a workforce. Read what it says they had.
Then wrought Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise hearted man, in whom the LORD put wisdom and understanding to know how to work all manner of work for the service of the sanctuary.Exodus 36:1
Wisdom. Understanding. To know how to work.
That is God's own vocabulary for people who could cut, join, weave, cast, fit and finish. He does not call it practical. He does not call it a support role, or a gift of helps, or the useful bit round the edges of the real thing. He calls it wisdom, and He says where it came from: He put it there.
Sit with the sentence in whom the LORD put wisdom. Not permitted. Not tolerated. Put. It is the same verb you would use about anything God deliberately places.
You are carrying a wisdom God put in you on purpose, and it is not the ordinary part of anything. Exodus 36:1 has the LORD putting wisdom and understanding into people so they would know how to work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word that old and lays it on a woman with a screwdriver in a back room.
I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this and it does not help anybody. I am not telling you that your work is secretly a metaphor, or that when you fix a thing you are really doing something else that matters more. That would be the same insult in nicer clothes. The point is the opposite. The work is the thing. God called the knowing-how-to-work wisdom, full stop, with nothing after it.
You are not the ordinary part of the room. You were never the ordinary part of the room. Scripture puts the wisdom and the understanding in the hands, and the Holy Spirit has not since revised that into something less.
There is something else in this passage that took me years to see. The people who made the tabernacle were making the place where God would meet His people. Nobody was going to look at the joinery. Most of it was covered by something else. It was made to that standard anyway, by people who had been given wisdom for exactly that, and God recorded their names.
Take the honest half of it as well. Being good with your hands has probably cost you things. You get asked. You get asked again. You have spent evenings on other people's problems and there is a tiredness in you that a compliment does not touch. That is real, and no verse takes it away.
But the tiredness and the low estimate are two different injuries, and only one of them is true. You have been tired in something God gave you, and the tiredness is real and the low estimate is not. The written word says the LORD put the wisdom there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference in you tonight between an ache and a verdict.
The small word in front of it was never God's.
Somebody said it once, kindly, without meaning anything by it, and you agreed, and then you kept agreeing for thirty years until it stopped sounding like an opinion and started sounding like a fact about you. It is not a fact. It is a habit of speech that got inside.
You are wise in the exact way the written word uses that word, and it was put in you rather than earned by you. Exodus 36 says the LORD put wisdom and understanding into the ones who knew how to work, and the Holy Spirit is in you in the back room and not only in the front one.
So the hands stay. Nothing about your life has to change tonight. What changes is what you call it when you drive home.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, hands out, wherever you are. The standing to speak this way is Christ's and it was given to you rather than achieved by you, so a woman who has been called the practical one for thirty years has exactly as much right to say it as anybody at the front. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is what makes it land, and the outcome is His, so what anybody says about you tomorrow is not yours to arrange.
- Small word sitting in front of what I do, you are not God's word about my hands. Scripture says the LORD put wisdom and understanding in the ones who knew how to work, and you have been standing in front of that sentence for thirty years and you come down now.
- Quiet verdict that I am the ordinary part, in the name of Jesus you have no place in me. The written word calls the knowing-how-to-work wisdom, and the Holy Spirit put it in me on purpose and has never once described it as the useful bit.
- Father, these hands are Yours and the wisdom in them came from You. I thank You that Exodus 36:1 calls it wisdom and understanding and never adds a smaller word to it, and I am holding them out to You now and taking Your word over thirty years of a kind one.
Exodus 36:1
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