I Threw All Of It Out In One Afternoon

It took about two hours.

Everything. Nine or ten years of it. Off the shelf in the workshop, out of the box under the bench, the two on the windowsill in the house that your wife had put there, and the one your daughter had asked for and never taken.

Into the truck. Down to the tip.

And I want to say the honest thing about that afternoon, because I do not think it was a rage and I do not think it was despair. I think you felt something like relief, for about a day and a half, and then it turned into something else, and it has not turned back.

Here is what I think actually happened, and I am not going to pretend to know your heart, but I have sat with this shape before.

Every one of those objects was a record of an attempt. And the record was not neutral. Each one carried, along with the wood, a small note about the gap between what you had wanted it to be and what it was.

Ten years of those notes on one shelf gets heavy.

So the clear out was not really about the objects. It was about the accumulated evidence of trying and falling short, and taking it to the tip felt like closing a very long account.

And it worked. The shelf is empty and the notes are gone.

But you have not started anything since, and it has been a while now, and that is the part that has begun to bother you.

Because it turns out a person cannot make one thing without immediately beginning a new shelf.

Are they not in thy book

There is a line in a psalm that I have carried a long way, and it is about a kind of record keeping that does not work the way ours does.

David is in trouble and afraid and he is not tidying it up for God. And in the middle of it he says something extraordinary about what heaven keeps.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Thou tellest my wanderings. Put my tears into thy bottle.

Tears in a bottle. A book with the wandering written in it. That is a God who keeps the parts of a life that a man would clear out, and He keeps them the way you keep something valuable rather than the way you keep a receipt.

You are known by a God who collects what you would take to the tip, and Psalm 56:8 says the tears go into a bottle rather than into a bin. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line from a hunted man and lays it on an empty shelf in a workshop.

And notice what is not in that verse. There is no assessment of the wanderings. He does not say thou tellest my wanderings and gradest them. He keeps them.

You have a record kept somewhere that carries no verdict in it, and it is already settled in the written word that the keeping and the judging are two different acts. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who kept a shelf and read a verdict off it every day for ten years.

The shelf was not the problem

Now let me be precise about this, because I do not want you to think the clear out was a sin. It was not.

Getting rid of ten years of objects was a reasonable response to what those objects had become. They had become a running assessment, and living beside a running assessment is exhausting, and you took the exhaustion out to the tip. Anybody would understand that.

But the shelf was never the problem. The reading was the problem. And because the reading has not changed, the next thing you make will start a new record on day one, which is exactly why nothing has been made.

And here is what needs saying plainly. What was on that shelf was not a measure of you. Not the good ones and not the poor ones. Ten years of objects say almost nothing about a man except that he kept going, which, until that afternoon, you had.

You are not being graded by anything you make, and heaven has never once kept a scoreboard in a workshop. Psalm 56:8 has God bottling tears and telling wanderings without one word of appraisal, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a record clean of judgment.

And do not decide the answer is to make things and get rid of them each time. I know that plan. Making and destroying keeps you clear of the shelf and it also keeps you clear of everything else.

You have permission to let a new thing exist, and this is yours: the keeping in that verse is tender rather than evaluative. It is written in Psalm 56:8 that the tears go into a bottle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that the kind of record you are actually under.

Twenty minutes, and it stays

So here is the ask, and the second half is the whole thing.

Tonight, make one small thing in twenty minutes. Use what is already there. Driftwood, an offcut, whatever is nearest.

And then put it somewhere in the house. On a sill, on a shelf, on the bench. Somewhere it will be seen by you tomorrow.

You are keeping one thing tonight, and it is already settled in Psalm 56:8 that the keeping carries no verdict inside it. The Spirit of God is the one who lets an object exist in a house without being read every time somebody walks past it.

That is the part that undoes the afternoon. Not making. Making was never hard for you. Letting one object exist in your house for more than a day is the thing that has not happened since the truck came back empty.

It will be poor, and after this long a gap it will be poorer than what you threw away. Leave it. Do not correct it and do not put it out of sight.

And do not put a second one beside it this week. One is not a shelf.

You are covered while one thing sits out where you will see it, and Psalm 56:8 is the ground under that. The written word has God keeping the wandering without grading it, and the Spirit of God is present in a workshop with one rough object and nine empty feet of shelf.