None Of It Came Out Of The Fire

Thirty years of it. Every single piece.

The first one, which was terrible, and which your wife had kept on the shelf in the hall for a reason you never fully understood. The good one from about the middle. The set you made the year your daughter was born, all six of them.

And the tools, which is a separate grief and which people understand better, so that is the one you tell them about.

I want to say the plain thing at the start, because you have had a lot of people say kind things that missed.

The tools can be replaced. The thirty years cannot.

And you have not started again. It is coming up on two years and there is a bench and there is wood on it and there is nothing on the bench that has been touched.

Here is what I think is in the way, and tell me if I am wrong.

Starting again admits it.

As long as you have not begun, some part of it is unresolved, and the shelf in the hall is a thing that is missing rather than a thing that is gone. Make one new object and put it on that shelf and the old ones have been replaced, and you cannot bear the word replaced.

That is not irrational. That is a man protecting something.

But there is a cost to it that has crept up on you, which is that a maker who does not make is losing something else on top of what burned, and two years is a long time.

The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away

There is a sentence that gets said at a lot of funerals and is usually said too fast, and I want it said slowly, because it was not said fast by the man who said it first.

Job has just lost everything, in one day, including his children, and he tears his clothes and shaves his head. That is the scene. And then this.

And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. (Job 1:21, King James Version)

The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away.

You have thirty years of giving that no fire reached, and Job 1:21 names the giving as its own fact before it names the loss. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the first half standing after the second has happened.

Notice both halves are named. He does not skip the first one. Before he says anything about the taking, he says the giving, and the giving is a fact that the taking does not erase.

You had thirty years of giving that no fire reached, and Job 1:21 names the giving as its own fact before it names the loss. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence from the worst day in the book and lays it on a workshop that has been silent for two years.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away, and therefore there is nothing to grieve. He is on the ground with his clothes torn while he says it.

You have permission to say a true thing about God on the ground, and it is already settled in the written word that the blessing and the tearing happened in the same hour. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has not touched a bench since it happened.

Making again does not replace anything

Now let me go at the word that has been stopping you, because I think it is the wrong word.

Replaced.

A thing you make this year does not replace a thing that burned. It cannot. Objects are not interchangeable and nobody who loved that first terrible one would think a new one stood in for it. Your wife kept that one on the shelf because of when it was made and who made it and what it was, and none of those are transferable.

So what would go on that shelf is not a replacement. It is a different object entirely, made by an older man, in a different house, after something.

And this: what you make now is not a measure of what was lost. A poor thing made this year does not diminish a good thing made in nineteen eighty something. They are not in competition and they never could be.

You are not replacing anything by beginning, and heaven has never once treated a new work as a cancellation of an old one. Job 1:21 keeps the giving and the taking as two separate facts, and the Spirit of God is the one who will not let them collapse into each other.

And I am not going to tell you to make one of the things you lost. Do not attempt the set. Do not recreate the good one from the middle. That would be a replacement, and that is exactly the thing you are right to refuse.

You have permission to make something that has nothing to do with any of them, and this is yours: the beginning is not an admission and never was. It is written in Job 1:21 that he blessed the name of the LORD while sitting in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man to a bench without asking him to close anything.

Twenty minutes, and nothing like the old ones

So here is the ask.

Tonight, make one small thing in twenty minutes. Out of driftwood, an offcut, whatever is nearest and cheapest.

And make something that is nothing like anything you lost. Not the same kind of object. If you made bowls, do not make a bowl. Make a wedge, a handle, a shape, something that has never been on that shelf and never would have been.

That is deliberate. It keeps the word replaced out of the room entirely.

You are beginning rather than replacing, and Job 1:21 was said by a man on the ground with his clothes torn and it was still true. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a beginning happen without anything being closed.

It will be poor. Two years off and unfamiliar tools, and it will show. Leave it poor and do not go back over it.

And do not put it on the shelf in the hall. Put it somewhere else, anywhere else, for now.

You are steadied at a bench that has been quiet for two years, and Job 1:21 is the ground under that. The written word blesses the name while a man sits in the ashes of it, and the Spirit of God is present in a workshop where somebody is beginning without closing anything.