The Shed With Nothing on the Bench

The shed is eleven feet by eight and he built it himself the summer they moved in.

He goes out after supper. Most nights. The light over the bench comes on with a click and the little radio on the shelf comes on with it, tuned to the station that plays other people's memories between the traffic reports.

The bench is clear. It has been clear a while. There is a coffee can of screws sorted by length, a hand plane he oiled in the spring and has not used since, a pencil lying in the groove where a pencil belongs. He sweeps a floor that does not need sweeping. He winds an extension cord that is already wound.

Up the yard, through the kitchen window, he can see his wife crossing the room with a dish towel. Over the fence there is the blue flicker of somebody else's television.

He knows every hymn they ever sang at his mother's church. He could say grace at a table full of strangers tonight and not stumble over a word of it.

And standing there with the broom, with the radio going and nothing at all on the bench, it comes to him that he has not told God anything about his own day in a long time. Not about the leak under the sink. Not about his brother. Not about the good news in the spring that he never once said out loud upward. Not the small stuff, which turns out to be most of it.

There was no argument. There was no morning he decided.

He turns the radio up a little and hangs the broom back on its nail.

That is you, standing in the light over a clean bench, with nothing being made and nothing being said, and no story to account for either.

Nothing is what it was made of

Let me tell you the thing I have learned standing in a lot of sheds and a lot of kitchens, because it is not the thing people usually preach at this.

A distance like yours was never built. It was left. Nobody laid a course of bricks between you and God, and you did not pour a footing for one. What happened is that a Tuesday went by with no word in it, and a Tuesday is a small thing. Then a week did. Small things do not announce themselves, which is exactly what makes them small. And here you stand on the far side of a great deal of nothing, looking for the wall so you can point at it and say, that, that is what it was, and there is no wall there to point at.

You are seen tonight in the light over that bench, and the seeing is not new and it is not some fresh discovery He is making about you. I am not handing you my own good opinion here. That is what is written in Jeremiah 31, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written thing into a room and makes it weigh something, or nothing I say to you holds any warmth at all.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Look at the order of that sentence, because the order is the whole gift. The love comes first. The drawing is the therefore. He does not draw a man in order to find out whether the man is worth loving. He draws because the loving was settled long before there was a shed, a yard, or a Tuesday to lose.

And the word under drawn is a working word. It is the word for hauling a bucket up out of a well by the rope, steady, hand over hand, by somebody standing at the top who can see the whole length of the line. You have been drawn already, and the drawing is what put you at that bench with a broom in your hand and a question in your chest. His word says the cords are kindness, and His Spirit is the one who has been pulling, gently, for longer than you have been aware of any pull at all.

He never asked for the reason you cannot find

Here is what I think has actually stopped you, and I say it with no edge in it, because I have watched good men stand in this exact spot.

It is not guilt. You would have known what to do with guilt. It is that you feel you ought to arrive with an account, and every returning story you have ever heard came with one: a rock bottom, a night on a floor, a moment with a date on it. Yours has none of that. So somewhere along the line you concluded that a distance with no story attached is a distance you have not earned the right to close, and you have been standing in a shed ever since, waiting to be able to explain yourself.

You have nothing to prepare and no case to make, because the case was never being heard. That is not softness on my part. Jeremiah 31 gives the reason for the drawing and the reason is His own everlasting love, not the returning man's summary, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room while you read it.

Read the verse again and try to find the interview in it. There is no clause where He says, once you can tell me what happened. There is no condition where the rope goes slack until a cause is produced. A father hauling a bucket up a well does not stop halfway and ask the water to account for the depth.

So set the account down. You are drawn by kindness and not summoned by a court, and that is your standing tonight, resting on the word of God and not on my warmth toward you. The Holy Spirit did not spend all these quiet evenings keeping a small ache alive in you so that a prosecutor could use it. He kept it alive because a man who feels the pull is a man on his way up.

The turn is one sentence long

The drift took a long time because it was made of small things, one evening at a time. Now hear the other half, and this is the part I most want in your hands before you put that light out.

The turn is not made of small things. The turn is one movement, and it is short.

There is no walking back through every unsaid Tuesday to say the thing you did not say. There is no reconstruction. Nobody is asking you to rebuild the years the way a man rebuilds a fence panel by panel down the whole length of a yard. You lift your head, you open your mouth, and you find you are facing Him, because He was never at the other end of anything. He was at the top of the well the whole time, with the rope in His hands.

You have a Father at the top of the line, and the last stretch of it is already His to pull and never yours to earn. That is Jeremiah 31 exactly as it stands, and the Spirit of Christ is the one making it live in a shed tonight rather than leaving it a fine sentence in an old book.