The Tower Will Never Be Ready

The wind comes across the churchyard from the west, and there is rain in it that has not arrived yet, and everybody on site keeps looking at the sky the way people do when they have twenty minutes and know it.

It is half past nine on a Thursday in October. The scaffolding went up on Monday. This is the third time in Ivy's life that scaffolding has gone up around this tower, and she has the file to prove it, a green three ring binder with three sets of quotes and two schemes that got as far as a drawing and no further.

Ivy is on the committee. She has been on the committee for nine years, which she did not intend and cannot now remember agreeing to.

There are four of them in the mud this morning. Dermot, who has the contract and has done towers for thirty years and talks about them the way other men talk about horses. Priya, the surveyor, who is young and thorough and has a tablet in a rubber case. Ivy. And Ivy's neighbor Bernard, who came because Ivy said there would be coffee.

They climb. The ladder inside the tower goes up through three floors of dark and dust and pigeon smell, and at the top the louvers let in bars of cold light, and there is the bell frame.

Priya says something about the tie beam. Dermot puts his hand flat on the oak.

"See these?" he says. Ivy looks. Cut into the beam are shallow chiseled marks, a V and a set of scratches like tally lines, the same mark repeated along the timber. "Carpenter's marks. Fifteenth century. He numbered his own joints so he could put it together in the right order once it was up here."

Beside the medieval oak is a bolted steel brace, industrial, painted a green that has not been made for eighty years. Beside that, a nylon strap with a ratchet, orange, obviously modern, obviously somebody's afternoon in the 1980s.

Ivy stands looking at six hundred years of other people's Thursdays, bolted together, holding.

"Dermot," she says. "When is this tower going to be finished?"

Dermot laughs. Not unkindly, and not at her.

"It isn't," he says. "It's not that sort of building."

He picks his bag back up. Rain starts on the louvers, a light rattle, arriving early.

"Rang on Sunday, though," he says, and starts down the ladder.

You have a green file too.

Yours is the running record of the thing about yourself you were going to sort out before you could really belong anywhere, and it has quotes in it and abandoned schemes and two rounds of scaffolding, and the honest total after all these years is a tower that is not finished. Somewhere in there you concluded something about yourself that you have never said out loud, and it has been quietly deciding how much of you turns up to things. You are already inside the people God is preparing, and the preparing was never handed to you as a job. Scripture says God perfects what concerns His own, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that work in a church made entirely of people with green files.

Six hundred years unfinished, and it rang on Sunday

Start with what Dermot actually said, because it is the whole thing.

It is not that sort of building. A tower like that was never a project with a completion date. It is a long conversation between generations of people who each did the bit they could reach, and the medieval carpenter and the Victorian ironmonger and whoever ratcheted that orange strap on a Saturday in the 1980s are all in the same conversation, and not one of them saw it done.

And it rang on Sunday. That is the part that reorders everything. The tower does its actual work while it is scaffolded. The bells sound over the houses out of a building that has a survey report saying it needs eleven thousand dollars of repointing.

That is the church, and the church is what Scripture is talking about when it uses this language: a whole people, a company, a building made of people rather than of stone, going up over centuries, being worked on constantly and functioning the entire time. Not a private renovation of one soul. A body of people, some of them repointed, most of them not, all of them ringing.

You are part of a people who are being made ready together, and you are not the one holding the trowel. That is written into Psalm 138:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old song about God finishing what He starts and makes it a present fact in a person standing in the mud.

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.Psalm 138:8

Look at the grammar of it. There is one worker in that sentence and it is not the psalmist. The psalmist is not perfecting anything. He is naming who does, and then he says the reason, which is not his own promise or his own progress but mercy that endures forever, and then he asks God not to abandon the works of His own hands, which is the safest request ever made, because the hands in question have never abandoned anything.

You have been taken up as the work of His own hands, and He does not walk off a site. The word says His mercy endures forever, and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of that in the church, which is Paul's word and not a comforting idea somebody had.

Perfect is not a grade

Here is where the English word does damage, so let me take it out of the way.

When we hear perfect we hear a standard, and a standard implies a mark, and a mark implies somebody grading you. That is not the sense of the word here. The word behind it means to complete, to bring to its intended end, to finish a thing off in the way a carpenter finishes a joint. It is a word about a maker's intention, not about a candidate's score.

Nobody is grading your progress. There is no checklist on this site, there is not going to be one, and if you have ever been handed one, it was not from Scripture. You are not being assessed, and the readiness you have been trying to manufacture was given to the church as a gift. The written word says God perfects what concerns His own, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works it, which puts the whole business on His side of the table.

And notice what feeling unready proves. Nothing. It is not a diagnosis and it is not insight. Ivy standing in a cold tower feeling like nothing gets finished was in a building that had rung out over the whole parish four days earlier. Her feeling was accurate about her Thursday and completely wrong about the tower.

Your sense of being unfinished has no authority over your standing, and it has no right to stay in the seat it took. Psalm 138:8 says the perfecting belongs to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that word louder in you than the survey report.