What Your Hands Were For

For the first two years the boy was allowed to sweep.

He got good at it, too. He learned that cedar shavings and walnut shavings want different brooms. He learned that you sweep toward the door and never toward the bench, and that the fine dust that settles under a workbench has to be lifted with a damp cloth or it comes back up into the varnish for a week afterward.

He also learned the list. Everybody in that lane learned the list. Do not touch the chisels. Do not touch the plane. Do not put your hand on a soundboard, ever, not with clean hands, not even to steady it. Do not walk along the window side of the bench when the glue pot is hot. Do not open the top drawer.

He could have recited it in his sleep, and some nights he did.

The master worked with his back to him, mostly. He was not unkind. He said good morning, and he said that is enough for today, and once, when the boy's mother was ill, he sent him home with soup and never mentioned it afterward. But he did not explain anything, and the boy walked home every evening carrying a complete list of what his hands were not for and not one single line about what they were for.

By the end of the first year he had quietly decided it was a test he was slowly failing.

In the second autumn the master called him over to the bench. The boy came with his hands behind his back, which had become a habit somewhere along the way.

The master put a block plane into his right hand and closed the fingers around it. Then he turned the boy's wrist over, looked at the angle, moved it maybe a quarter of an inch, and set a rib of walnut into the vise.

"Two passes," he said. "Long ones. Do not stop in the middle."

The first pass was terrible. The second came off in a curl the length of the boy's forearm, thin enough to see the window through, and it hung in the light a moment and then dropped into the shavings.

Neither of them said anything about it.

Then the master took the boy's own hand and laid it flat on the soundboard of the instrument lying strung on the bench, and reached underneath and plucked one string. And the boy felt the wood move against his palm.

"That," the old man said, "is what the two years were for."

Nobody ever told you the second half

You can recite your list.

It is a good list. Some of it was handed to you by people who loved you and some of it you built yourself out of things that went badly, and it has kept you out of trouble that would have cost you dearly. Where you do not go. What you do not watch. Who you do not answer at eleven at night. You know it cold, the way that boy knew his.

And if somebody stopped you in a doorway and asked what your hands were made for, you would have nothing. Not because you are shallow. Because nobody ever told you. You were given the first half of a sentence and you have been standing in it for years waiting for the rest. His Spirit never stopped mid sentence, and what is written was never only a fence.

So let me take you into Leviticus 8, which is a chapter people skim because it is procedural, and it is the single clearest picture in Scripture of what is actually happening to you.

Aaron and his sons are brought to the door of the tent in front of the whole congregation, and four things happen to them in order. They are washed with water. They are clothed, layer by layer, the coat and the sash and the robe. They are anointed with oil poured over the head. And then blood is put on three places on the body: the tip of the right ear, the thumb of the right hand, and the big toe of the right foot.

Sit with that order for a second, because it is the thing you were never shown. The washing is not the end of the sequence. It is the first move of four. Every article that stops at getting clean has stopped one quarter of the way through a ceremony, and then wonders why the whole business feels like maintenance. Leviticus 8 does not stop at the basin, and His Spirit does not stop there either.

And look at what the three places are. The ear, which hears. The hand, which works. The foot, which goes. Nobody puts a mark on a wrist to say do not use this. Those three points are hearing, doing and going, and they are marked because they are about to be used.

Here is what that means for you, and it is finished, not pending. You are set apart for something and not merely away from something. The old wording for putting a priest into his office is filling the hand, and that is precisely the shape of it: at the end of that chapter their hands are not empty, and the same Spirit who moved the writer to record it in that order is the one filling yours.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

Read the last clause slowly, because it changes what kind of a day tomorrow is. The works were prepared beforehand. Before the hands were. There is not an empty field ahead of you where you now have to invent a purpose out of your own leftovers; there is something already laid out, and you are being walked into it.

And that walking is not yours to power, which is the second weight I want off you tonight. The prophet promised a new heart, a new spirit, and God's own Spirit put inside a person, and then said the reason: so that He would cause them to walk in His statutes. Cause. Not require. You have a new heart and His Spirit in you, and Ezekiel 36:26 and 27 put both halves of that in the same breath, which means the walk was never a performance you had to generate out of willpower.