My Father's Tools In The Garage

They are on the second shelf, where he left them.

You do not use them. You have your own, better ones, bought in the last ten years, and they are in a case on the floor where you can reach them.

His are chisels mostly, and a plane, and a marking gauge with his initials burned into the handle because that is what men did in that trade.

And there is a worn place on the handle of the plane, on the right side, where his hand went. You can see it from across the garage.

You have taken that plane down twice since. Both times you stood there with it, and put it back, and both times something in your chest did a thing you could not have described to anybody.

Here is what has started happening, which is why I am writing this one.

You have begun to feel that you should do something about that shelf. Not because anybody said so. Because a shelf of unused tools in a working garage looks, to a practical man, like a problem that has not been dealt with.

So you have started to be slightly embarrassed about your own father in your own garage.

Let me put that down properly, because that shelf is not a problem, and the thing you are doing has a very old name.

They carried him all that way

There is a verse at the end of Joshua that records the conclusion of a four hundred year promise.

And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem. (Joshua 24:32, King James Version)

They carried his bones out of Egypt. Through the sea, through the wilderness, for forty years, through every camp and every crisis, and buried them in the ground he had asked for.

That is an enormous amount of carrying for an object with no practical function. Nobody in that generation had met him. And the text records it as a thing done rightly, without one word about whether it was time to move on.

You are carrying something the way they carried Joseph, and carrying it has never once been a failure to let go. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man looking at a worn place on a plane handle, and Joshua 24:32 records a four hundred year keeping and treats it as faithfulness.

And here is what is not in that account.

Nobody suggests that the bones are slowing them down. Nobody proposes leaving them at a convenient point in the wilderness. The carrying is simply part of who those people were, across generations, and it is written down with respect.

You are doing something scripture writes down with respect, and no shelf like that has ever once been a problem in need of dealing with. The written word carries a man's remains for four centuries without embarrassment, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who has started to feel awkward about his own father.

What a practical man does with grief

Let me say the honest thing about men and garages, because I think it applies here.

A practical man handles things. That is his whole competence. A problem appears, a man assesses it, deals with it, and moves on, and he is good at that and it has served him and his family for thirty years.

And grief cannot be handled. It is not a problem with a solution in it, and a man whose one tool is handling will keep reaching for that tool and finding it will not fit.

You have been reaching for the one tool that does not fit, and that has never once been a failure of skill. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who is competent everywhere except at one shelf, and Joshua 24:32 records a carrying rather than a resolving.

And this is where the embarrassment came from.

Your eye reads the shelf as unfinished work. Unused tools, taking up space, not dealt with. That is an accurate reading of a garage and a completely wrong reading of that shelf, because the shelf is not work and never was.

You have been reading a shelf as a task, and it has never once been a task and it was always a man. The written word treats the carrying of somebody's remains as a duty kept and not a job outstanding, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has been misfiling his own father as a chore.

One door, and the shelf stays

So here is today, and it is smaller than anything done in that garage in years.

Open the door. Go in. Look at the second shelf on purpose.

Then come out and close the door.

You are looking at it on purpose and taking nothing down, and looking has never once obliged a man to act. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing in his own garage doing nothing, and Joshua 24:32 records the carrying and never the resolving.

Here is why on purpose and not by accident.

At the moment you see that shelf sideways, while looking for something, and every time it catches you slightly off guard and produces the small embarrassment.

Going in on purpose puts you back in charge of the moment. Same shelf, same plane, same worn place on the handle, and a man who walked in deliberately to look at his father's tools.

You are the one who decides when you look, and that decision has never once belonged to anybody else. The written word carries the bones the whole way as a chosen thing, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man who walked into a garage on purpose.