Nobody Ever Showed You The Drawing

Tuesday evening, the community hall behind the library, and the whole room smells of hot sawdust and the glue that never quite dries. Six of them around two long benches. A radio on the windowsill playing something nobody chose and nobody turns off. A woman called Dot building a bird table with the patience of a stonemason, and a young man by the door who has made the same shelf three times because he likes making shelves.

And at the end bench, Marcos, sanding.

He has been sanding the same chair for eleven weeks. It came in wearing three coats of the wrong varnish and a burn mark on the arm from somebody's cigarette in a year Marcos was not alive for. He has taken it back nearly to bare wood. He is still going. The tutor comes down the room with a mug in one hand, picks up the arm, turns it over in the light, and asks him the friendliest question in the world.

"What's it going to be?"

And Marcos says, "Smoother."

The tutor laughs, because for a second he thinks it is a joke. Then he sees that it is not, and he sets the arm down very carefully, the way you put down something that belongs to someone, and he says the sentence Marcos is still turning over in the parking lot an hour later. "Smoother isn't a shape, hermano. Show me the drawing."

There is no drawing. There was never a drawing. There was a burn mark and a bad varnish and a strong, honest, decent feeling that both of them had to go, and eleven weeks later there is a chair that is eleven weeks less of something and no more of anything.

You know that bench. Ask you what you are trying to stop and the list comes out without you looking at it: the temper, the phone at midnight, the second glass, the tone your voice takes when your mother rings. Real material has come off. Nobody is calling you lazy. But ask you what you are being made into and you go quiet, or you say "better," which is the same answer as smoother and has exactly as much shape in it.

Smoother is not a shape

Paul is writing to a set of churches he loves and is worried sick about, and he reaches for the strangest picture in any of his letters. Not a builder. Not a soldier. A woman in labor, and he says he is the one in it.

My little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.Galatians 4:19

Formed. Not scoured. Not stripped, not scraped, not sanded. Formed, which is what happens when something arrives that was not there before and takes up a shape you can point at.

So hear this before we go one step further, because it changes what you think you are doing on Tuesday nights. You are being formed and not merely cleaned up, and the forming is under way in the ordinary week you are actually living, this one, the one with the washing in it. That is not my encouragement talking. Galatians 4:19 puts the labor on the One doing the forming rather than on the one being formed, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that work in you while your eyes are on this sentence.

And now the part that costs something to admit. Subtraction is real work and it is not nothing. A chair with the varnish off is genuinely better than a chair with the varnish on. But subtraction has a ceiling built into it, and the ceiling is this: when you have taken away everything that should not be there, what you are left with is not a chair. It is bare wood. It is honest, empty, unobjectionable bare wood, and nobody sits on it.

That ceiling is why the list on the back of your door has never once made you glad.

And one thing gets said out in the open here, at the bench, not in small print at the bottom where nobody reads it. Some of what is on that list is not a splinter, it is a wound, and a wound wants hands that are not your own. Tell your doctor, plainly, the way you would report a cut that will not close. Sit down with a counselor and then keep the second appointment, which is the one people skip. Find one person who carries the unedited version of you rather than the Tuesday night version. Other hands in the room have never been a diversion from this: I have not once watched God do this work in anybody without somebody else's hands somewhere in it. And if the evenings have gone heavier than a list, if the arithmetic has started to include what this room would look like with your bench empty, call or text 988 tonight, or the crisis line for your area, and keep a person beside you while you dial.

You have people in this, and you were never meant to be the only pair of hands on your own chair. Scripture says two are better than one, because if one falls the other lifts him up, and it is the Spirit who puts those people in a room and gives them their words when they get there. Asking is not the opposite of trusting God. At this bench it is what trusting God looks like.

The drawing exists, and it has a face

Here is the thing the tutor knew and Marcos did not. Every maker in that room except one was working from something. Dot had a picture torn out of a magazine. The young man had the shelf in his head from his grandmother's kitchen. You cannot make a thing towards nothing.

And nobody ever asked you to.

For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.Romans 8:29

Read that again slowly, because the drawing is in it and it is not a diagram. It is a Person. The destination of everything God is doing in you has a face, a voice, a way of coming into a room, a way of dealing with people who had let Him down that week.

You have the drawing already, and it is on the table in front of you every time the Gospels are open. You were not left to guess at the shape of your own becoming and then blamed for guessing badly. Romans 8:29 says the pattern was settled before you had an opinion about it, and His Spirit is the One holding that pattern steady in you now, on a night when you cannot feel a single degree of difference.

Love is the shape, and it is not a shorter list

If you want to know what a life shaped like Him actually looks like on a Tuesday, Paul already wrote it out, and everybody hears it at weddings and almost nobody hears it as a portrait.

Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It keeps no record of wrongs.1 Corinthians 13:4-5

Do not read that as a checklist. Read it as a description of somebody you have met. Patient with the slow one. Kind to the person who did not deserve the kindness and knew it. Keeping no record, which is a whole way of walking around, not a rule you remember at the last second.

That is the drawing, and you have been given it. What you are being made into is not a shorter list of faults. You are being made into love with a face on it. The word says so plainly rather than leaving it to your own guesswork, and His Spirit is the One doing the shaping while you are asleep and while you are standing in line and while you are still sanding.

Notice what that does to the burn mark. It does not excuse it and it does not pretend it away. It just stops being the subject. A man building a chair still deals with the varnish, but he deals with it on the way to something, and he can tell you what the something is.