The Roll Of Chisels Under The Stairs

The roll is canvas, and it ties with a length of cotton tape, and it lives in the cupboard under the stairs behind the vacuum cleaner.

Twenty-two chisels in it, in their pockets, in order, because they were always in order. She oiled them in the spring the way she has oiled them every spring for thirty years, sitting on the floor of the hall with a rag and a tin, and then she rolled them up and tied the tape and put them back behind the vacuum cleaner.

Two years. Two years since the morning her hands stopped agreeing to it, and then the shoulder, and then the long slow business of learning what the word chronic actually means when a doctor says it kindly in a small room.

She cut letters. That was the thing. Not walls, not slabs: letters, in stone, by hand, for churches and for graves and once for a library that put her name on nothing at all and she did not mind. She could hold a line for a whole afternoon. There is a particular sound a chisel makes when the angle is right, and everybody who has ever done it says the same thing, that you hear the letter before you see it.

The workshop went eighteen months ago. The bench went to a man in Yorkshire who paid what it was worth and was decent about it. The banker mason she trained is doing well and sends photographs of his work, which she looks at every time, all the way through, and then puts the phone down.

At two years, nobody asks any more. That is not unkindness. The question has no new answer, so people stopped, and they were probably right to, and it still landed like a door.

This afternoon she is on the floor of the hall again, for no reason, with the cupboard open and the roll across her knees, not untying it. Just the weight of it. Her husband is in the kitchen and has not come through, because he knows, and there is nothing to say that has not been said in two years.

Somebody at church told her in the week that God restores the years the locusts have eaten. She knows the verse. She has read it many times, sitting right here, and it has never once reached the floor of this hall.

Maybe that is where you are. Something you actually were is over, and everybody else adjusted to it long before you did.

The word, before anything grows anywhere

I will deal with the name of this site before I say a word about growth, because otherwise it sits in the room doing quiet work.

The word abundance in that verse is life, and nothing else. Not money, not a payout, not a workshop reopening under a different roof. Fullness of life, in a person, in the body they have actually got.

You have been given that already, in the body you have this morning, and it is not a reward for coping well with two years. It is written into John 10:10, said by the Shepherd about the life He came to hand over, and the Holy Spirit brings a sentence like that down onto a hallway floor.

What I am not going to say about oaks

Isaiah says it like this, and it is worth reading slowly rather than at speed.

to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.Isaiah 61:3

Oaks. Trees planted where the burning was. It is a beautiful line and it has been used as a weapon on more grieving people than almost any other, because it gets read as a forecast, and it is not a forecast. It does not say when. It does not say what. It does not say the tree will be the shape of the thing that burned, and it says nothing at all about the tree being an improvement.

So I am not going to tell you what will grow in your life, or when, and I am not going to tell you that the thing you lost was clearing the ground. Anybody who says that to a woman with a roll of chisels on her knees is guessing, and guessing out loud with somebody else's two years is a cruelty even when it is meant warmly.

You are grieving something real, and the grief is not unbelief and it is never treated as unbelief in the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at a distance waiting for a better attitude about it. That is what the word shows, all the way through, in how God speaks to people who have lost the thing they were.

And something is alive here anyway

Here is the part I do want to say, and I want to say it carefully, because it is easily turned into the thing I have just refused.

New life comes up in burnt ground. Not as a replacement, not on a schedule, and with no obligation to look like whatever stood there. It comes up small and it comes up ordinary, and it is almost always noticed by somebody else before the person it is happening in notices it.

I do not mean a second career. Smaller than that. The way a person listens now, which there was never time for before. The friend who rings you rather than somebody else, because they have worked out that you can sit still with something hard. Hearing the difference between a person who is fine and a person who is saying they are fine. None of it is a consolation prize and none of it was worth what it cost, and both of those are true at once.

You have life in you at two years, with the chisels tied up in a cupboard, and that is not a compliment I am paying you. It is John 10 and the Shepherd's own sentence about what He came to give, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps it alive in a body that no longer does what it did.

Naming it is not the same as being grateful for it

I want to be exact here, because these two get welded together, and the weld is where people get hurt.

Naming a living thing in your life is not gratitude for the loss. Nobody is asking you to be thankful for the hands. A person can name a small green thing and hate the fire in the same breath, and God is not offended by the second half of that.

The naming matters because a thing left unnamed stays invisible, and somebody at two years has usually stopped looking for anything at all. It is not optimism, and it is not a technique. It is refusing to walk past what is actually there.

You were not left in burnt ground with nothing put into it, and I am not saying it to close the grief, because the grief stays open exactly as long as it stays. It is what is written in Isaiah 61 about the planting of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the planting rather than a process anybody has to manage.