Nobody Showed Me the Finished Piece

There is a coffee can of pencils on the bench and not one of them has a point on it.

Late afternoon in a shop off an alley, the good hour, when the sun comes through the high window and the whole room fills with sawdust hanging in the air like it is being kept there on purpose. A radio on a shelf is playing something nobody chose. It smells of shellac and cut walnut and the coffee somebody left at eleven.

He is twenty two and he is sanding. He has been sanding, in one way or another, for two years.

Today it is edges. A stack of them on trestles, long strips of walnut, and the job is the same on every one: block, 120 grit, along the grain, then 180, then the pad of his thumb down the length of it to feel for the place where his hand slowed down. Sawdust has collected in the crease of his elbow, and a fine gray line of it sits in the seam of his knuckle that does not come out with soap.

He is good at it now. That is the strange part. Two years ago he burned an edge and had to start over; now his hands know things his head has not been told.

Because here is what has never happened in two years. Nobody has shown him the piece.

He knows these strips go somewhere. He has heard a word for it once, in a phone call he was not part of. He has watched them get carried out the back and loaded into a van and driven off, and he has sanded the next stack. He asked, in his first month, what it was going to be. The old man who runs the shop said, without unkindness and without looking up, keep going, and that was the whole answer, and he has never asked again.

So he stands there in the good hour with his thumb on the grain, and the thought comes the way it does about once a week now: I could do this for ten more years and be excellent at it and still not know what I am making.

And if somebody stopped him tonight in the alley and asked him what he is working toward, he could describe it only by subtraction. No burn marks. No cross grain scratches. No high spot at the end where your hand lifts.

Maybe that is your two years. You could give a full account of what you are trying to stop, the temper or the scrolling or the way you talk to yourself at midnight, and it is a real account and you have worked at it. But if somebody asked what you are being made into, in one sentence, with no negatives in it, there would be a pause in the alley and you both would hear it.

A shorter list is not a picture

Start with what that pause in the alley is actually made of, because it is not laziness and it is not a lack of seriousness.

Almost everything we get taught about change is subtraction. Stop this. Cut that out. Get free of it. And subtraction is real, and some of it is urgent, and nobody sanding an edge should be told the burn marks do not matter. But subtract everything on the list and what stands there is not a new man. It is the same man with fewer marks on him, and that is not what the word says is happening.

You are being made into somebody, not merely being cleaned up, and the difference is the whole of what this shelf is for. Ephesians 4 does not describe a believer as a person with a shortening list; it describes growth up into a Head, and the Spirit is the one doing that growing, so what is happening in you is positive work and not only removal.

Think how strange that would be in the shop. Two years of a young man told what not to do to a piece of walnut and never once told what the walnut is for. He would get skilled and he would get tired, and the tiredness would be the honest kind, because nobody runs long on a job with no object at the end of it.

You have not been told what you are for by a description of what you are quitting, and asking for the piece is not ingratitude. The written word says the goal is the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, and the same Spirit who is doing the work is not secretive about what He is making.

The pattern is a Man, and you have seen Him

Here is the sentence, and it is worth reading twice because most of us have only ever heard it read at conferences.

Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.Ephesians 4:13

Read what the standard is. Not a list of virtues. Not a behavior code. A person. The measure is the stature of a Man, and the Man has a face and a way of talking to people and a manner in a room, and He has been described in detail across four accounts precisely so that nobody has to guess what He is like.

That is the finished piece. It was never withheld from you. You have been handed it in the plainest possible form, a Man walking around in the pages, letting a woman touch His coat in a crowd, asking the blind man what he wanted rather than assuming, cooking fish on a beach for the friends who had run out on Him.

You have already been shown the piece, and you were shown it long before anybody handed you a list of what to stop. That is what the Gospels are, His word given as a portrait rather than a code, and it is the Spirit who takes what is written about Jesus and makes it live in the room where you actually are.

So when the question comes in the alley, what are you being made into, the answer is not a trait. The answer is: like Him. Warm the way He is warm. Unhurried with people the way He was unhurried. Able to be in a room with somebody's shame and not add to it. That is the stature. It is a person you could recognize walking toward you.

What it costs to sand with nobody in the room

Say the plain thing here, because two years of subtraction with no object in front of you does something to a person, and it is not only spiritual.

If the tiredness has gone past tiredness, if the shop has been gray for months on end, if the days are being got through rather than lived, take that to a doctor, because sleep and pain and chemistry are physical facts and not character flaws. Take it to a counselor too, because nobody surveys their own workshop from the inside, and somebody trained can walk the floor with you and see the light you stopped noticing. And if the evenings have started running somewhere past regret, toward a bench with nobody standing at it, pick up the phone tonight and call or text 988, or the crisis number for your county, and stay with a person until the worst of the hour has gone by. Somebody else showing up in this is one of the ways God does it, and never evidence that He is not.

You have not been at that bench by yourself, and you were not by yourself through the whole two years you thought nobody was watching the edges. Proverbs 27:17 sets one piece of iron against another and calls that the way a man's face gets sharpened, which makes a second person in the shop part of the tooling rather than proof the first one failed. When somebody walks in and picks up a block on the other side of the stack, the Holy Spirit put him on that road.