I Did Not Put the Finish On

The shared shop takes up the back half of an old brick building, and in the morning the light comes through the high windows in long slants full of dust, which is the only pretty thing about the place.

Gil has a bench in the corner by the dust collector, which nobody wants, which is why he has it.

He has been working the same board since spring.

One plank. Wide, figured, the kind of board a man buys once and then is afraid of. It is meant to be a table top for his sister, and he told her it would be ready by summer, and then by fall, and lately he has stopped saying when.

He sands it. That is the whole activity. Eighty grit, then one twenty, then one eighty, then back to one twenty because he found a scratch, then one eighty again. He works it under raking light with his cheek almost on the bench, looking down the length of it for the one flaw he knows is in there somewhere. He has never once let anybody at the shop look at it up close. If someone comes over he puts a cloth across it, casually, the way you would move a cup.

Four months. He could tell you the exact number of hours.

On a Tuesday he comes in early, before the others, coffee in one hand, and the light is doing the dust thing, and he pulls the cloth off his bench.

Somebody has oiled the board.

Overnight. The whole face of it, wiped on and wiped back the way you are supposed to, and the grain has come up out of the wood like something surfacing. Ripple and flame all the way down where before there was only pale sanded nothing. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever had his hands on and he has never seen it before this minute.

There is a rag folded on the corner of the bench and no note.

Gil stands there for a long time with his coffee going cold.

He did not put the finish on.

That is your question too.

You have been working on one thing in yourself for a long stretch now. Quietly, under a cloth, with a hand ready to cover it if anybody walks past. You told yourself, in words or not, that when it was smooth you would let yourself belong somewhere. And now something has happened that does not fit the plan, and you are standing in the middle of gladness and grievance and cannot sort out which one you are.

You are being made ready, and the making ready is not your project. That is what the written word says about the whole company Christ is at work in, and Scripture names the Spirit of the Lord as the one doing it, not the one supervising while you do it.

Read who is being changed, and by whom

There is a sentence in Paul's second letter to Corinth that people quote about themselves, and they nearly always shrink it on the way.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.2 Corinthians 3:18

Two things in it, and both of them are load bearing.

The first is who. We all. Not the advanced ones. Not the ones who have got somewhere. A whole company with their faces uncovered, being changed together into one image, which is the same image for every one of them. This is the plain sense of the bride language too, and it is worth saying flatly: in Scripture the bride is the church, a whole people, corporate, the way a nation is called God's own. It is never a private arrangement between Christ and a reader and it is never a romance. The readying is done to a people.

The second is the verb. Are changed. Not are changing themselves. Not are working hard at changing. It is something happening to them while they look at Him, and the sentence names who is doing it: the Spirit of the Lord.

You are being changed, and it is His Spirit doing the changing while you look at Him. That is not a soft reading of the line, it is the line, and the word puts the work on Him and the looking on you.

The cloth over the bench

Here is the part I think is actually costing you.

The cloth is not modesty. The cloth is a rule you made. Nobody sees this until it is right. And the rule sounds humble, and it is not humble, because it quietly puts you in charge of the timetable of your own acceptance. You decide when you are presentable. You hold the cloth. Nothing about your belonging can begin until you say so.

I am not going to hand you a list. There is no readiness checklist in this message and there will not be one, because the moment a checklist appears you are back at the bench with the cloth in your hand, working grits.

And I am not going to grade you either. The feeling that you are not ready is a real feeling and it is a poor witness. It tells you where your attention has been. It tells you nothing whatsoever about your standing.

You have a place in this company that was never waiting on your progress. Scripture puts the readying of the church in His hands, and the same Spirit who is doing it is not consulting your sense of how far along you are.

The four months were not wasted

Let me also say the thing Gil needs said, because there is a grievance in him and it deserves an answer rather than a scolding.

Four months of looking down a board under raking light does something to a man. He knows that wood now. He knows where the figure runs and where it wants to tear out and how it drinks. None of that is undone by the oil.

The sanding was real work and it was good work. It was simply never the finish, and it was never going to become the finish however long he did it. Sanding and finishing are two different operations, and only one of them makes the grain come up.

You are not being told your effort was foolish, and you are not being asked to despise the four months. The word says the changing is His Spirit's work, and a man can labor honestly and still be given the thing he could not have done.