Set Aside For One Job

The chisels lived in the bottom drawer of the bench, rolled in a canvas wrap that Wendell oiled twice a year whether it needed it or not.

Six of them. English steel, boxwood handles gone the color of strong tea, his father's initials struck into the tang of every one with a letter punch and a light hand. When his father died in the fall, Wendell brought the roll home in the footwell of the truck, put it in the bottom drawer, and that was where it stayed for twenty two years.

He was not neglecting them. That is the part you have to get right or the rest of this will not land.

Two or three times a year he took the roll out and laid it open on the bench and went over them. Wiped each one. Checked the backs against the light for rust freckling. Put an edge on them, a real edge, the kind you test on the hair of your forearm and then feel a little foolish about testing. Then he rolled them back up, tied the tapes, and slid the drawer shut.

In those same twenty two years he built a good deal. A deck. A run of shelving in the utility room. Two sets of steps and a dog house that outlasted the dog. He built all of it with a cordless driver and a box of screws and sheet goods from the yard, which is honest work and nothing to look down on.

Never once with those chisels.

If you had asked him why, he would have given you the answer that had been sitting ready in him for two decades. Those are too good to use.

Then in March his granddaughter Reeve, who was fourteen and had watched somebody cut dovetails on a video and had decided that was going to be her, came out to the shop and said she wanted to build a bookshelf. Not screwed together. Cut.

Wendell said he would see what he had, and he meant a plastic-handled set from the hardware store, and while he was talking she had already crossed the shop, opened the bottom drawer and lifted the roll out, because it was the only thing in the whole bench that looked like it mattered.

He got as far as the first syllable of her name.

She had the tapes undone by then and the wrap laid open under the bench light, and she picked up the half inch, and she went still for a second, and she looked up at him.

"Grandpa, these are already sharp."

He did not have anything to say to that.

Twenty two years of putting an edge on six tools he was never going to let touch wood. He had been maintaining them for a job he would not permit them to do, and he had been calling it taking care of them, and standing there in a shop with the light on and his granddaughter holding his father's chisel, he heard it for the first time as what it was.

She cut her first pin that afternoon and she cut it badly. Blew out the back corner, went past her line, said a word she does not say in front of her mother.

And the chisel did exactly what a chisel does. It went where she pushed it and it cut what she asked it to cut, twenty two years late and no worse for the wait, and the shaving came off the boxwood so thin the light came through it.

Wendell sat down on the stool by the wall and watched her ruin three more, and about the fourth one he said, out loud, to nobody: "I thought I was taking care of them."

Reserved is not the same as stored

Somewhere in your life somebody taught you that holy means away.

Away from things. Away from people, mostly. A shorter list of places you go and a shorter list of words you use and a shorter list of nights out, and you can recite all of it, and here is what nobody tells you about a list of nots. It cannot tell you what you are. You can subtract from a life for years and end up with a smaller life rather than a set apart one, and then wonder quietly why the quiet feels less like a temple and more like a drawer.

Now go and read what the word actually does in Scripture, because it almost never stands alone. It leans forward. Set apart for. Consecrated to. A thing is taken out of ordinary use because it has been assigned to a particular use, and the taking out is never the point of the exercise. His Spirit has never once used that word to mean shelved.

You have been kept for something and not merely kept from something, and that is what 2 Timothy 2:21 is saying when it calls a set apart vessel fit for the Master's use and prepared for every good work, and the Spirit who moved Paul to write it to a discouraged young man is doing the same work in you while you read the sentence.

If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.2 Timothy 2:21

Read the back half of that verse and notice how much of it is about work. Fit for use. Prepared for every good work. Nothing in the sentence stops at clean. Clean is the front half, and the whole grammar of it runs downhill toward a job.

Leviticus 8 shows you what that looked like on an actual body, and it is one of the strangest and most tender ceremonies in the whole book. Aaron and his sons are washed with water. Then they are clothed. Then oil is poured on them. And then blood is put on three places and only three: the tip of the right ear, the thumb of the right hand, the big toe of the right foot.

What you hear. What you handle. Where you go.

That is not a list of restrictions. That is a job description written on a man in the places he would use to do the work, and every one of the three is an instrument of doing rather than avoiding.

You have hands that were marked for handling and feet that were marked for going, and that is the pattern God set down in Leviticus 8, and His Spirit did not preserve a ceremony about ears and thumbs so that His people could spend their lives sitting very still.

And the washing came first in that chapter, which tells you where washing sits. It is the opening of a sequence and never the end of one. Anybody who has been made clean and then handed nothing to do with it is standing halfway through a ceremony that has three more movements in it.

Here is where it gets personal, because I do not want you walking away from this with a new assignment on your shoulders.

The walking is not yours to generate. Ezekiel 36 says He gives a new heart and puts a new spirit inside, and takes out the stone one, and then says something that ought to take the pressure off permanently: He will put His Spirit within them and cause them to walk. Cause. The verb belongs to Him.

It is already settled in you, and it was settled by Him. What is written in Ephesians 2 is that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them, and the same Spirit who prepared that road is the one who moves your feet along it.

Prepared beforehand. The job existed before you did. You were not kept in a drawer while somebody thought up something for you to do. You were kept sharp.