Mine Sits Next To My Father Work

His hands were better than yours. That is true and we should start there.

Not by a little. He had done it for thirty years before you were old enough to hold anything, and he had the kind of ability that people mentioned to each other. You grew up watching a man at the top of a craft and thinking that was what the craft looked like.

Nobody told you that was unusual. Why would they. It was the only bench you had ever seen.

So now, thirty years later, you make a thing, and the moment it is finished a second object appears beside it that is not physically in the room. His. Not a specific piece of his either, which would at least be fair. An assembled ideal, made of the best joint you ever saw him cut and the smoothest surface he ever produced, and the way he could take a plane off a board and it made that sound.

You are not comparing your work to his work. You are comparing your work to a highlight reel of a lifetime, assembled by a boy who was in awe.

And there is a second thing in it that is harder to say. Some of this is love. Keeping his standard alive feels like keeping him. Letting yourself make something merely alright can feel like admitting he is gone, or that you were never going to be him.

I am not going to touch the love. I want to take the measuring off it and leave the love exactly where it is.

Let every man prove his own work

Paul writes a line to the Galatians that reads like something a craftsman would say, and it has one word in it that decides everything.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6:4, King James Version)

His own work.

Prove it, test it, look at it honestly. That is not a soft verse. It expects a man to examine what he made. But the standard it hands him is his own work, and then it closes the door on the other option in the plainest possible way: and not in another.

You are told to prove your own work and no other man's, and Galatians 6:4 shuts the second bench out of the room by name. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an instruction written to a squabbling church and lays it on a man standing over something he just made.

And look at what comes with it. Rejoicing in himself alone. There is a gladness attached to a man's own work that is only available on those terms.

You have a rejoicing that is waiting on the far side of the comparison, and it is already settled in the written word that it cannot be reached any other way. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has not been glad about anything he made in years.

The reel is not a bench

Now let me press on the comparison itself, because it is not even a fair fight and I want you to see the shape of it.

Your father made bad pieces. Every craftsman does. He made things that went wrong and things he was not pleased with and things he did over, and you did not see most of them, because a boy does not see the failures. He sees what stayed in the house and what got given away, and those are always the good ones.

And the pieces that did get seen were seen at the end of a thirty year run of practice that happened before you arrived. You met the finished man.

You were never in a contest with an edited film, and Galatians 6:4 gives a man his own work as the measure and closes the other door by name. The Holy Spirit is the one who ends a comparison that could not be won.

So what sits beside your work is not his bench. It is an edited film. There is no version of your evening in which you beat an edited film, because it does not exist and never did.

And this: what you make is not a measure of you, and it never was a measure of him either. He was your father whether the joint was tight or not.

You are competing with something that has never existed, and heaven has never once weighed a man's work against another man's best day. Galatians 6:4 puts the measure on a man's own work, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends a contest that could not be won.

And do not go the other way either. Do not decide he was overrated so you can feel better. Cutting him down to your size is not freedom, it is the same measuring with the numbers reversed.

You have permission to make something merely alright, and this is yours: the honoring of him was never in the quality of your joints. It is written in Galatians 6:4 that the rejoicing is in himself alone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps love and measurement from being the same act.

Twenty minutes, and no second object

So here is the ask.

Tonight, make one thing. Twenty minutes, with what is already in the house. Small. A wedge, a peg, a spoon blank, a box side.

And when you finish, do not let the second object appear. When it starts to, and it will start within about four seconds, say out loud, this is my own work. Then put it down and walk out of the room.

Walking out is not avoidance. It is how a man stops a habit that runs faster than his thinking.

What you make will be nowhere near his and that is not tonight's subject. Leave it as it comes out, do not clean it up, and do not do it again to a better standard.

You are covered while it comes out worse than his, and Galatians 6:4 is the ground under that. The written word gives a man his own work as the whole measure, and the Spirit of God is present at a bench where somebody is not measuring for the first time in thirty years.