I Started Mending Things At Night

The tap in the back bathroom. The gate. The drawer that stuck.

The third stair, which had creaked since before the children were born and which you had never once got round to in twenty years, and which you fixed at half past eleven on a Wednesday in the first month.

You could list them. I imagine you could list them in order.

And nobody in your life would say a word against any of it. A man whose marriage ended and who spent the following six months quietly making his house work again is not a man doing anything wrong. Several people probably told you it was healthy.

But you know the shape of it, because you have been alone with it.

You did not fix those things in the daytime. You fixed them at eleven, at midnight, at one, because that is when the house was loudest.

And now you have run out.

That is the thing you have not said to anybody. There is nothing left in this house that is broken. Everything works. And a man who has been getting through the nights on a list has come to the end of the list, and it is eleven o'clock, and the house is exactly as quiet as it was going to be.

I am not going to tell you the mending was avoidance. It was not. A man has to get through a night and hands are a real way to do it.

But repairing is running out, and making is not, and that is the whole of what I have come out here to say.

He healeth the broken in heart

There is a line in a psalm about God that puts two things side by side, and the pairing is the point.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. (Psalm 147:3, King James Version)

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.

Binding up is not healing. Binding up is what you do at the time, with your hands, before anything has healed and while everything still hurts. It is a practical act done in the middle.

And the verse gives God both. He is not only the one who heals eventually. He is the one who binds it up tonight.

You are being bound up in the middle of it right now, and Psalm 147:3 gives God both the healing and the binding rather than only the far end of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old line about wounds and lays it down in a house at eleven at night with the tools still out.

And notice the order of the clauses. The healing is named first and the binding second, which is not the order it happens in. Scripture puts the outcome first and then goes back to the hands.

You have a God who does the practical part in the middle, and it is already settled in the written word that the binding is His work as much as the healing is. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man standing in a house where everything now works.

Repairing runs out. Making does not.

Now let me get to the actual difference, because this is the useful thing and nobody will have said it to you.

A repair is defined by something being broken. It has a finite supply. Every fix takes one item off a list and no fix adds one, and a house is a closed set. Six months of good work and the well is dry.

Making is not like that. Nothing has to be wrong for it to start. There is no list to finish, and it does not depend on damage existing anywhere.

That is not a small distinction for a man who has been getting through his evenings on repairs. It is the difference between a supply that ran out on you and one that does not.

And this: what you make tonight is not a measure of how you are doing. It is not a progress report. A poor object on a Wednesday says nothing about whether a man is recovering, and I am not going to read it that way and neither should you.

You are not out of things to do with your hands, and heaven has never once limited a man to fixing what somebody else broke. Psalm 147:3 has God binding up in the middle, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a pair of hands from repair to making without any ceremony.

And do not go looking for something else to fix. Do not go round to your daughter's and offer to do her gutters this week. I know that plan. That extends the list and it does not change anything.

You have permission to make something nobody needed, and this is yours: the binding up in that verse is not conditional on there being a job to do. It is written in Psalm 147:3 that He bindeth up their wounds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man company past the end of a list.

Twenty minutes, and not a repair

So here is the ask, and there is one hard rule inside it.

Tonight, at whatever hour it is when the house gets loud, do twenty minutes of making.

And it must not be a repair. Not a fix, not an improvement to something existing, not a job that needed doing. Something that did not exist before, that nobody asked for, that does not solve anything.

You are being bound up in the middle rather than only healed at the end, and Psalm 147:3 gives God both of those. The Holy Spirit is the one who is on a porch at midnight while a man makes something nobody needed.

That rule is the whole exercise. If the house is better off at the end of twenty minutes, it was a repair and it does not count.

Use what is out there. It will be poor, because six months have gone on things that had a correct outcome and this one does not have one, and your hands will not know what to aim at.

Let it be poor. Do not fix it up before you come in and do not throw it away.

You are held while your hands do something with no correct outcome, and Psalm 147:3 is the ground under that. The written word gives God the binding as well as the healing, and the Spirit of God is present on a porch at midnight where a man is making a thing nobody needs.