Framing With No Drawing

The wall goes up on the count of three and four men walk it into place, and somebody gets a brace on it before it has stopped moving.

It is a Saturday morning in June and half the road has turned out to help raise a pole barn on a lot at the end of the lane. There is a folding table with a coffee urn on it. There are two coolers under the tailgate of a truck. Somebody's kid is picking sixteen penny nails out of the grass and putting them in a coffee can, which is the best job on the site and everybody knows it.

He is the one they keep deferring to, because he has framed for thirty years and it shows in his hands. He snapped the layout on the deck before anybody else got there. He crowned every stud. He set the king studs and the trimmers and the header without measuring twice, and the wall came out so square that the sheathing went on like it was falling into place.

Somewhere before ten a young man with a tape on his belt asks him, honestly, where the plans are.

And he laughs, because there are none. There never were. He is building it the way his uncle's barn was built, out of a picture he has carried in his head since he was fourteen years old, and it will be a good barn, and it will stand for sixty years, and not one line of it exists on paper anywhere in this county.

At noon he sits on the edge of the deck with a sandwich and his boots hanging over, and the question comes back around on him from a direction he was not watching.

Because he has been building something else for a lot longer than thirty years.

He has been trying to be a better man since he was nineteen. He knows the techniques. Get up earlier. Read the chapter. Watch the mouth. Apologize faster than you want to. He is good at all of it in the way a man gets good at anything he has done that long.

And sitting there with a sandwich he cannot answer the young man's question about himself. If somebody asked him what he is building toward, he would have nothing to unroll. Thirty years of framing, and no drawing at all.

You know that deck. You may have never held a chalk line in your life. But you have been working on yourself for a long time, and if somebody stopped you at noon and asked what the finished thing was supposed to look like, the honest answer would be a shrug and a list of things you would like to quit doing.

Square is not the same as designed

A man can frame perfectly square and still not know what he is building. That is the whole trouble on that deck, and it is not a trouble about skill.

Technique is real. Getting up earlier is real. So is watching your mouth, and so is apologizing before your pride has finished its argument. None of that is wasted and I am not about to talk anybody out of it.

But technique answers how. It has never once answered what. And a man who has spent forty years getting better at how, with nothing on paper about what, will end up building his uncle's barn, which is to say the last decent man he happened to watch closely.

You are being built toward something specific, and it was drawn before you ever picked up a tool. Romans 8:29 says God set it out beforehand that we would be conformed to the image of His Son, and it is His Spirit who does the conforming, so the drawing exists and it is not a thing you have to compose out of your own good intentions.

Here is what usually gets handed to a person at this point, and it is thin. Stop this. Cut back on that. Get the temper down. Every one of those is a subtraction, and you cannot build a barn out of subtractions. A pile of things you no longer do is not a structure. It is a cleared lot.

You have a drawing already, and it is not a list of what you quit. Scripture puts the whole of it on a Person rather than on a policy, and the same Spirit who inspired that page is the one holding the pencil, which means what you are being made into has a face and a name.

The drawing is a Person

Here is the sentence people reach for, and it is the right one, and it gets read wrong more often than any verse I know.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.Galatians 5:22-23

Nearly everybody reads that as a report card. Nine boxes, and a person going down the row deciding how they did on each one, feeling all right about peace and poorly about temperance, and coming away from the passage graded rather than shown anything.

Read it as a portrait instead. Every word on that list is a description of Jesus Christ. That is what He is like in a room. That is how He was with the woman at the well, and with Peter after the fire, and with the men who came for Him with lanterns. Paul did not hand the churches a checklist. He handed them a face.

And look at the noun. Fruit. Not product. Not output. Not deliverables. Fruit is the thing a tree makes when a tree is what it is, and no apple was ever assembled.

You are on His tree, and fruit is what happens to a branch that stays there. Jesus said in John 15 that a branch bears nothing on its own and everything while it abides, and the Spirit named in Galatians 5 is the one whose fruit it is called, so what grows on you is His nature showing up in your life rather than your character finally getting its act together.

You were joined to Him and the joining is what makes the likeness. It is written in Ephesians 2 that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit is the one working, which puts the drawing, the lumber and the labor all on the same side of the table and it is not your side.

What that looks like on a Tuesday

Somebody is going to ask what any of that means when the alarm goes off. Fair question, and here is the plain answer.

It means the thing being formed in you is a way of being with people, not a record of things avoided. Patience that outlasts the second time somebody tells you the same story. A steadiness that does not need the last word. A gladness that is not conditional on the week going well. Kindness that costs something and does not mention what it cost.

Notice that not one of those can be measured on a Tuesday morning, and notice that not one of them is something you can decide to have by lunch. That is not a defect in the design. That is what fruit is.

You have been in this building the whole time you thought nothing was going on. The written word says God is at work in you both to will and to do His good pleasure, and the same Spirit who wrote that through Paul does not pause when a man stops noticing.

And if the reason you cannot see any of it is heavier than a busy season, if the mornings are gray and the sleep has gone wrong and nothing tastes like anything, that is not a spiritual failing and it is not to be carried alone on a deck at noon. Go see a doctor, because a body running low will flatten a man's whole read of his own soul. Get in front of a counselor. Give a pastor the true version instead of the one that sounds fine. None of that is a step around God; very often it is exactly how He shows up on a job site. And if the evenings have carried you past regret and into figuring that the crew would get along fine without you and so would the house, do not wait for morning. Call 988, or a crisis line, and have one man out on that tailgate with you tonight.

You have people God intends to use in this, and asking them is not a shortcut around Him. Scripture calls the church a body with parts that need each other, and His Spirit has always done a good deal of His work through somebody with a truck and a free evening.