I Took Up The Thing My Father Did

You had no interest in it. That is what makes this strange.

For thirty years he did it in the evenings and you were politely uninterested. You could not have told anybody what the difference was between the tools. You had watched him at it a thousand times and absorbed nothing on purpose.

He died in the February.

By the middle of March you were out there.

Not thinking about it. Not deciding. You went out for something else entirely, and there was the bench, and you picked something up, and about forty minutes later you noticed the time.

And you have been going out most weeks since, and you have not told anybody why, mostly because there is no why available. If somebody asked you at a table what made you take it up, you would have nothing to say that did not sound either sentimental or unhinged.

So I want to take the question off you before we do anything else.

You do not have to know why.

I have sat with a lot of people in the first year and this is one of the commonest things that happens and one of the least talked about. The hands go somewhere before the person does. They start doing a thing, and the thing is often something to do with the one who has gone, and the person doing it feels obliged to explain it and cannot.

There is no obligation to explain it. Not to your family and not to yourself.

His compassions fail not

Lamentations is a book written by somebody in the middle of it, and that is why it is worth reading in the middle of it.

It is not a book about grief written afterward, in order, with the meaning worked out. It is jagged. And in the middle of a chapter that is largely bitter, this arrives, without preparation.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22, King James Version)

They are new every morning.

Not they accumulate. Not they arrive when you have processed something. New every morning, which is a supply that does not depend on where the person is up to.

You are being met every single morning regardless of what you understand, and Lamentations 3:22 attaches the mercy to His faithfulness rather than to your clarity. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written from the middle of a ruin and lays it down in a workshop that used to be your father's.

And notice the honesty of where it sits. Nothing before it in that chapter has been resolved. The writer does not stop lamenting after this verse either. He says a true thing in the middle and keeps going.

You have permission to say a true thing in the middle without anything being resolved, and it is already settled in the written word that the mercy is not waiting for the grief to finish. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who cannot answer a simple question about his own hands.

The meaning can stay open

Now here is the thing I most want to keep off you, because people will hand it to you kindly.

Somebody will tell you what it means. They will say he is with you out there. They will say the mantle has passed, or that it is his way of staying close, or that a man is working through something.

Some of those may be true. None of them are for anybody else to hand you, and none of them need settling this year.

Because the moment the making has a meaning, it acquires a job. And a thing with a job can fail at it. If it is a tribute, it has to be worthy. If it is working through grief, it has to be working. And then the evening gets spent checking whether it is doing what it is supposed to do, and that is not what your hands went out there for.

And this: what comes off that bench is not a measure of your love for him, and it is not a measure of how you are doing. It is twenty minutes and some wood.

You are not required to know what this is, and heaven has never once asked a grieving man to file an interpretation. Lamentations 3:22 gives mercy without asking for an account, and the Spirit of God is the one who leaves a meaning open when everybody else wants it closed.

And I will say the other half. Do not decide it means nothing either. Do not go out there insisting to yourself that it is only a hobby. That is the same closing from the other direction.

You have permission to leave it unexplained, and this is yours: the mercy in that verse arrives new each morning without reference to where you have got to. It is written in Lamentations 3:22 that his compassions fail not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a question open for as long as a man needs it open.

Twenty minutes, and decide nothing

So here is the ask, and the second half is the whole of it.

Go out this week and do twenty minutes at that bench. Whatever the work is. Pick up the thing your hand goes to.

And decide nothing. Not out there and not on the way back in. If a thought arrives about what it means, notice it and put it down the way you would put down a tool, and carry on.

Do not make anything of his. Do not attempt one of his patterns or copy something he made, not this week. Make whatever comes.

It will be bad. He had thirty years and you have had seven months and the difference will be obvious in the first cut. Leave it bad. Do not correct it and do not stop because it is going wrong.

You are steadied at that bench without knowing what you are doing there, and Lamentations 3:22 is the ground under that. The written word supplies mercy new each morning to somebody who has not worked anything out, and the Spirit of God is present in a workshop where a man is not explaining himself.