The Chisel He Set Down

The tools are laid out along the back of the bench the way they have been laid out since 1994, left to right, in the order he uses them, because a man who has to look for a chisel has already lost the line.

The light comes in high on the left and there is sawdust turning in it, gold, unhurried, the way it has turned in that light for thirty years.

The cabinet door is clamped and waiting. Oak. A rebate along the inside edge and a beading he has cut so many hundreds of times that he could once do it while talking to somebody about the football.

He picks up the chisel.

He gets nine minutes. Maybe ten. Then the tremor comes up through the shoulder into the wrist and the edge starts wandering, and the difference between a line that is right and a line that is nearly right is a thing his eye can see from across a room, and he sets the chisel down, and he sits on the stool, and he looks at the mark.

He is sixty-seven. This is not about age in the way people mean it when they say it kindly. He knows men of eighty at benches. It is a thing his own body is doing, and it has been doing it for two years, and it is getting on with it whatever anybody says.

What he cannot say out loud, to his wife, to his son who took over the van, to the doctor who was perfectly decent about it, is the size of what has gone.

It was not a job. He built the kitchen his children were fed in. He made the cot. He made the bench he is sitting at. There is a house four streets away with a staircase in it he cut when he was thirty-one, and he has walked past that house twice a week for thirty-six years and never once said anything to anybody about it, and every single time, he has known.

Those hands were how he loved people. Not the only way, but the main way, the way that came naturally to a man who was never good with sentences. And now the hands do nine minutes.

He is not angry with God. He tried that for a while and it did not fit him. What he has instead is worse and quieter: the sense that he has been quietly retired from being useful, and that there is nothing to be done about it, and that everyone around him is being very kind about a thing they have already accepted on his behalf.

So he sits on the stool in the gold sawdust light, with the chisel down and the door still clamped, and the workshop is very quiet.

If your hands are fine, this one may not be for you today. If something you did for decades has gone out of your body and you have been finding out what it costs, come and sit down. I am not going to explain it to you and I am not going to tell you how to feel about it.

There is a psalm that says it out loud and does not tidy it up

I want to take you to a psalm that nobody puts on a card, and I want you to notice what it is allowed to say.

Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent.Psalm 71:9

Read that again and notice what is not there. No apology for saying it. No qualifying sentence afterward about how he knows he should be grateful. He tells God his strength is spent, flatly, in the same voice he would use to report the weather, and the psalm does not correct him and the Spirit who carried that psalm into Scripture did not edit it out.

You are inside a book that says the strength is spent out loud and never once calls it a failure of faith. Psalm 71:9 is written exactly that way, and the Holy Spirit is the One who preserved it in those words so that a man on a stool in a workshop would have somewhere to stand.

That matters because of what has probably been happening around you. Everyone has been kind. And kindness, in this particular situation, tends to arrive as a hurry: somebody moves fast to the bright side, somebody says at least, somebody tells you about their uncle who took up watercolors. None of them mean any harm. But the effect is that the loss never gets said, and a thing that never gets said starts to feel like a thing that is not allowed.

It is allowed. It is in the book, in the first person, without a lesson attached.

You have a God who has not looked away from the bench and is not waiting for you to be reasonable. It is written in Psalm 71 that He does not cast off the one whose strength is spent, and the Holy Spirit is the One who brings that off the page into a workshop with the chisel lying down.

The gray hairs are in the sentence, not edited out of it

Now go a few lines on, to the verse this whole message is built on.

So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.Psalm 71:18

Look at what he asks for and, more importantly, what he does not ask for.

He does not ask for his strength back. He is not standing there negotiating for the return of what his body used to do. He asks not to be forsaken, and he asks for one more thing, which is that he not be finished with before he has handed something on.

And notice that the gray hairs stay in the sentence. He does not pray them away. He does not pretend to be forty. He puts the actual condition of his actual body in the middle of the prayer and keeps going, and the prayer is not weakened by it.

You were never valued in this house for the steadiness of your hands. That is what Psalm 71 says by what it leaves out of its own request, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that past the part of you that agrees with things and into the part that has been quietly holding a hearing about your own usefulness.

I want to be straight with you about two things I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you the steadiness comes back, because I do not know that, and a man in an article who promises another man's hands is not being kind, he is being careless with somebody else's life. And I am not going to tell you to make your peace with it. That instruction gets handed out constantly to people in workshops and it is always given by somebody standing outside the loss. What your grief does and how long it takes is not for me to schedule.

What I can tell you is who is in the room.

You are held with the gray hairs in the sentence and nothing about you edited out. Psalm 71:18 keeps the aging body inside the prayer rather than around the side of it, and His Spirit is the One who makes that a fact you can sit down inside rather than a verse you can quote.

The staircase four streets away is still cut. The cot was still made. Nothing you built has been withdrawn because your wrist changed. And the God the psalm is talking to is not running a ledger where a man's worth moves with what his hands can do this afternoon.