Who Is Left When the Hands Go

The shed smells of hot sawdust and instant coffee, and there is a bandsaw going somewhere behind the racking, and twelve men are getting through a packet of cookies that was meant to last the morning.

At the end bench there is a row of jam jars, and in front of them a shallow tray of brass screws, and a man who was a joiner for forty one years is sorting them by gauge. Fours in one. Sixes in another. It is a job, and everybody in that shed knows exactly what kind of job it is, and everybody is careful never to say so.

He was the one they used to send for. He hung the church doors. He made his daughter's armoire out of a fallen ash off the lane and it still shuts with that soft sound a good door makes.

His hands started going about three years ago. Not painfully. Just less each season, the way a river drops.

Somebody brings a mitre over for him to look at. He turns it in the light, holds it up at arm's length, and says the left cheek is a whisker proud. He is right. He is always right. And when the lad goes off to fix it, the old man sits for a moment with his hands flat on the bench, palms down, and looks at them the way you would look at a field that used to be yours.

That night, in the kitchen, his wife asks if he is all right, and he says the thing he has not said to anybody, and he says it looking at the table.

"I do not know who I am going to be when there is nothing left of what I could do."

I want you to hear that sentence at full weight, because a great deal of religious writing rushes past it, and you have been rushed past it too.

You have probably been told that it could be worse. You have possibly been told about somebody who is worse. It was meant kindly and it landed like a door closing, because what it actually said was that your loss has been weighed and found too small to sit down with.

It is not too small. It is enormous. And nothing here is going to be built on top of it by pretending otherwise.

What has actually gone, said out loud

Let it be counted properly first.

What has gone is not a hobby. It is a way of being in the world. It is being the one who gets sent for. It is the particular pride of a straight edge, and the smell of a job going well, and the standing you had in a room of people who knew what your hands could do. It is also the slow arithmetic of it, because a thing that goes by degrees never gives you a day to grieve on. There is no funeral for a capacity.

And there is a second loss underneath the first, which is the one that keeps a man awake. It is the suspicion that the doing was the person. That when the last of it goes, the room will contain a chair with somebody's name on it and nothing else.

You are God's child right now, in the middle of the losing, and that was settled before your hands started to change. This is not my comfort dressed up as doctrine; it is the plain sentence, that we are God's children now (1 John 3:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with a person's own spirit that this is true of them. Now. Not later. Not when something has been restored.

And plainly, before we go on: if this has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the shed would get through the work faster without you in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, any of the twelve, 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 a place at a bench for somebody.

Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.1 John 3:2

The end of the sentence is a Person

Read the second half slowly, because the shape of it is the whole answer to the question asked at that kitchen table.

What we will be has not yet appeared. John does not say that what is coming is a repair. He does not describe an inventory of returned capacities. He says that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, and He gives the mechanism, and the mechanism is seeing. We shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.

So the final state of a human being, in the only place Scripture says it plainly, is a likeness to a Person.

That is not a smaller thing than a working hand. It is the thing every working hand was ever a small picture of. And it means that the question at the kitchen table has an answer, and the answer is not a list of what you have left.

You are being brought to the likeness of Christ, and that is what you are for. Scripture puts the destination in a Person rather than in a body's abilities, and His Spirit is named as the one doing the bringing, which is why the losing of the doing cannot slow it. Nothing in that verse is waiting for you to be capable again.

And notice what is not there. There is no threshold. No level of endurance that qualifies a person for the appearing. It is not a reward for having borne it well, and nobody in that shed is closer to it than anybody else for being handier.