The Maul Stayed on the Block

His hand goes to the maul before he tells it to, because it is October and the wood is in the yard and that is what his hand has done every October since he was fifteen.

The rounds came off the trailer this morning, oak and a bit of ash, and they are lined up along the fence the way he always lines them up. His son-in-law is doing the splitting. He is doing it well, actually, better than last year, feet set, letting the weight of the head do the work. The grandchildren are ferrying one log each to the stack and getting in the way and being told to mind their fingers. His daughter is on the step with the coffee. It is a good afternoon. Nobody is unhappy in it.

He walks over between swings, the way he would to take a turn, and his hand closes on the handle where it leans on the block, and the hand knows before he does. The grip is not there. It has not been there since the spring, and it is not coming this afternoon by wanting it. He stands with the maul for a second as if he were checking the edge. Then he sets it back on the block, and goes to the stack, and starts turning logs bark side up, which is a job a child can do and one of them is already doing it.

Nobody says anything. That is not cruelty. His son-in-law does not look up because looking up would be worse. His daughter keeps talking. The afternoon goes on. He carried this yard for forty years and this year the yard is being carried without him and nobody has said a word about it, and it turns out the silence is its own kind of weight, because it means the thing that has gone has gone quietly enough that he is the only one standing at its grave.

You are the one whose hand went to the handle. Something you could do all your life you cannot do now, and the world has closed over the gap so smoothly that nobody has noticed there is one. Sit with me here on the step. I am not going to tell you it is coming back and I am not going to tell you to make your peace with it. Both of those are somebody else's verdict on your life. I have a different thing to say.

The loss is real, and it is allowed to be

I want to start where the maul is, not where the sermon is. What went out of your hands, or your legs, or your lungs, or your mind on the days it will not hold a thread, is a real loss, and losses are grieved. Nobody brings a casserole for this one. There is no service. The thing just stops being possible and the world rearranges itself around the absence, kindly, without a word, and you are left grieving a strength alone in a yard full of people. That is the pit. It is not self pity to stand in it, and it is not weak faith. It is honest.

And in the pit, before anything lifts, hear this said over you. You are not reduced by what has left you, and God has not marked you down for the loss. I say it standing on the written word, not on my own kindness: the psalm cries out do not cast me off when my strength is spent, and God did not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who comes alongside weakness itself rather than waiting on the far side of it.

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

Look at what that verse does and does not do. It does not say Lord, give me back the grip. It does not say Lord, help me accept it. It says do not leave me here without You, and that is a prayer a person can pray on the porch step this afternoon while somebody else swings the maul, and it is answered before it is finished. The psalmist is not told his strength is coming back. He is not told to be at peace with losing it. He is told, in the whole shape of the psalm, that the God who was there in his youth is there in the spending, and the spending changes nothing about whose he is.

Something else, and I want to say it carefully because a site about strength gets it wrong at exactly this bend. Paul asked three times for the thorn to go, and the answer was not the thorn going. It was my grace is enough for you, my power is brought to completion in weakness. People turn that into a poster. It is not a poster. It is a man who did not get what he asked for being told that God's strength does its fullest work in the very place he was ashamed of. You have the same answer, in the same place, at the strength you actually have this afternoon, and Scripture and not my sympathy is what says so. His Spirit does not need your grip to be back before He goes to work; the weakness is where He is working.

Fully His at the strength you actually have

Here is the lie that sits on the porch step beside you, and I have heard it in my own chest on a burned slope I could no longer walk the way I used to. It says less strength is less of you. It says the man who split the wood was the real one and the man turning logs bark side up is what is left. It counts what you can carry and calls the number your name.

God does not count that way. He never has. You are exactly as much His at the strength you have today as you were at the strength you had at thirty, and it is written, not wished, that even to your gray hairs He carries you, and that He who made you is the One who bears you. The Holy Spirit is not measuring you against the yard. He is in the yard with you, at the stack, turning logs.

I want to hold two things in the same hand and not resolve them early, because a prophet who resolves early has stopped telling the truth. The first thing: the maul stayed on the block, and that is a grief, and it is yours, and you do not have to be finished with it today or ever. The second: God is not smaller in you for it. Not by one measure. Neither of those cancels the other. You are allowed to stand in the loss and be held in it at once. Two weathers at one time is not confusion; it is accuracy.

And I need to say one plain thing before we go on. If the loss has taken you somewhere darker than grief, if you have started to think the family would be lighter without you on the step, tell one person tonight, and if you are in danger reach the crisis line where you live and let a human voice stay with you. That is not weakness. It is exactly the kind of help God sends. You have a place at that woodpile that does not depend on the maul, and the word of God, not the grip in your hand, is what says you belong. His Spirit says it too, and He says it in a yard where nobody else has noticed.