The Tools In Her Fathers Box

The box is wooden and the corners are dovetailed, which she did not notice for about fifteen years and now cannot stop noticing.

Her father made it. He made most things. And when he died, the family did the thing families do, and she came away with the tools, mostly because nobody else wanted them and she was the only one who could be trusted not to sell them.

She has used them ever since. Not for anything remarkable. Shelves. A gate. The chair that everybody sits on and nobody mends. She is good at it, in an unshowy way, and half that street has a job in it done by her at some point on a Saturday.

Here is the thing that happened at the kitchen table last month.

She was putting a hinge on and she reached for the small screwdriver, the one with the handle worn to the shape of a hand that was not hers, and she used it, and she put it back, and she carried on.

And about a minute later she stopped.

Because she had held her father's hand in her hand and had not noticed. Not once in the last however many years.

The tools have become equipment. That is all. They work, she uses them, she looks after them, she oils the plane. And somewhere in fifteen years the fact that they were given to her, deliberately, by a person, has quietly slid out of the picture, and what is left is a box in the back room that is useful.

She sat with the hinge half on and thought: when did I stop knowing whose these were.

If something in your hands has turned into equipment, come and sit at this table. Nothing here is an alarm.

Given is a different word from owned

Let me put a word back where it started, because ordinary use wears everything smooth.

In the world the New Testament was written into, a deposit was a serious and completely everyday thing. Somebody going on a journey left a valuable item with a neighbor. No paperwork, no insurance, nothing to enforce it. Two hands and one person's honor, and two rules that did not bend: it never became the keeper's property, and it went back in the condition it came in.

To be handed one was near the top of the compliments available in that world. Somebody looked at the thing they could least afford to lose, and then looked at you.

That is a completely different transaction from owning something, and the difference is not sentimental. It changes what the thing is.

Paul writes a line to the Romans that gets used in all sorts of arguments and is actually one of the steadiest sentences in the letter.

For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.Romans 11:29

Irrevocable. He does not take it back. Which means the giving is not an event that happened once and receded. It is a standing fact about what you are holding, and it is still true on a Saturday when you are thinking about a hinge.

You were handed a real thing on purpose, and it is still a gift in your hands this morning. Romans 11:29 puts the giving beyond recall, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the seal and guarantee on everything God gives in Ephesians 1:13, which means what has gone quiet is your noticing rather than the thing itself.

What has thinned is the seeing, not the deposit

Now the second half, and it is the one I want you to hear with a screwdriver in your hand.

You have not lost anything. You have not neglected anything. By any external measure you have been an excellent keeper: the tools are oiled, the box is dry, half a street is standing up straight because of you.

The thinness is entirely in the seeing, and that is a very different problem from the one you were quietly accusing yourself of.

And here is why the noticing itself matters. You have been shown this early, and you were shown it gently, and nothing whatever has been broken. Romans 2:4 says it is the kindness of God that leads a person, and it is His Spirit who carries that kindness at exactly the temperature a person can take, which is why what came to you at that table was one screwdriver and not a review of your entire life.

Now the part that makes the watching restful rather than nervous, because this is a site about keeping and it refuses to run the second half without the first.

You are the one being kept, and that has been true on every Saturday you were not thinking about it. 2 Timothy 1:12 says God is able to guard what has been entrusted to Him, and 1 Peter 1:5 says you are guarded by the power of God, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee, so the arrangement has never once rested on how attentive you were being.

Both hands in this belong to God. He is holding what you gave Him, and He is holding you while you hold what He gave you. A woman who thinks she is the last thing between a gift and oblivion cannot rest and cannot enjoy a Saturday, and you were never that.