Establish The Work Of Our Hands

The shed opens straight onto the water and at this hour the light comes in low off the surface and moves on the ceiling, which is the thing everybody notices first and nobody mentions.

There is a hull upside down on the trestles and two men and a boy and a lot of arguing about a plank.

He is sixty-one.

The hands went about three years ago and there is a name for it and the name is not the point. He can hold a mug. He cannot hold a plane for more than a minute and he cannot feel a joint through his fingertips, and feeling a joint through your fingertips is about eighty percent of what he knew.

So he sits on the bench by the door and he talks and they listen, mostly, and the boy is quick and will be good.

And underneath the whole afternoon there is a thing he has never said, which started when he went up the coast in the spring and saw the third of his boats in a yard with a tarp on it and the transom gone.

He built forty-one boats. Two are burned. Nine are gone entirely. Most of the rest are somewhere between tired and finished, because that is what happens to wood in salt water no matter what anybody does about it.

Forty years of hands, and the whole of it is quietly coming apart along the coast at about the same speed he is.

If you have gone and looked at something you made, you know what that feels like on the drive back, and you know you did not say anything about it when you got home.

Moses asked for it, which means it was not automatic

Weigh it first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets trimmed.

What this costs is not the plane and the joints, although those cost plenty. It is the fate of the work. It costs you the assumption that a life spent making things leaves things behind, which is the one consolation everybody offers a man who worked with his hands. It costs forty-one boats, at whatever speed the coast is taking them. It costs the drive back in the spring. And it costs you a thing you cannot say in a shed where a boy is learning, because it would land on him and it is not his to carry.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your forty years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the coming apart has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the shed would run better without a man on the bench by the door, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two on the trestles, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who keep asking you about a plank.

Now, Psalm 90, which is attributed to Moses and which is the bleakest honest psalm in the book, and read the last line of it.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.Psalm 90:17

Establish thou the work of our hands.

Now look at who is asking. This is a man at the end of forty years in a desert, who has watched an entire generation die out there without arriving anywhere, and who has spent the previous sixteen verses saying so with no softening whatever. Our years are spent as a tale that is told. We are consumed by thine anger. Seventy years, or eighty if we have strength, and it is soon cut off.

He is not a man with illusions about how long things last.

And what he asks for at the end of all that is not that the work be spared, or preserved, or protected from wearing out. He asks that God establish it. Which is a different verb entirely: to make something stand, to give it a footing it does not have on its own.

You are inside a prayer made by a man who had watched everything come to nothing and asked for the one thing that was not automatic. Psalm 90:17 asks God to establish the work rather than to spare it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a desert prayer and lays it on a bench in a boat shed.

Now, the fact that he asks at all is the thing. If the work of a person's hands stood on its own, nobody would need to ask. He asks because it does not. Wood goes. Salt gets in. Forty-one boats do exactly what forty-one boats do, and Moses knew the desert version of the same sentence.

And he says it twice. Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. He doubles it. In Hebrew that is not repetition for the sake of rhythm, it is emphasis, and it is the only doubled clause in the psalm.

You have a request that Scripture thought worth saying twice. That is written into Psalm 90:17, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a doubled clause land on a man watching light move on a ceiling.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a spring and a summer of good sentences have already been said in that shed.

It does not promise that any boat lasts. Not one of them. Moses did not get a promise that the tabernacle would stand forever, and he did not ask for one, and I am not going to hand you a promise he did not receive.

And it does not tell you the coast is being unfair to your work. Salt water is not unfair. It is salt water.

What it does is separate two things you have had joined together for three years: whether the work survives, and whether the work is established. Moses asks only for the second, from a man's position of having watched the first fail completely.

You were never asked to secure the standing of what you made. Scripture puts the establishing in God's hands and asks Him twice for it, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it into a shed at the water's edge.