The Tools Outlasted the Business

Thursday morning, and he is out at the shed at the end of the yard because he cannot be in the house.

The padlock is cold. It always sticks a little, and he does the small lift and twist he has done ten thousand times without ever once thinking about it, and the door comes open, and everything inside is exactly where he left it.

The miter saw under its cover. The level hanging on two nails. The socket set in its case with the 13 missing, because the 13 is always missing. The good tape measure on the bench and the bad one in the bucket. A coil of cable. The pegboard with the screwdrivers hung in order and the black marker outlines drawn round each one, which he did on a Sunday afternoon years ago and has been quietly pleased about ever since.

His father's planer, on the shelf, wrapped in the same oily rag it has been wrapped in since 1991.

He stands in the doorway and does not go in.

Every single thing in that shed is his. Not one of them has anywhere to go on Monday.

The van went back Tuesday. The number is dead; he rang it from his own phone to hear what it did, which he is not proud of. The lettering on the side of that van, the lettering his wife drew out on the kitchen table nine years ago with a pencil and a ruler and a lot of opinions, has been peeled off in a yard somewhere by a lad with a heat gun who did not know whose name it was.

And the tools are all here. Sharpened last month. Paid for.

That is the thing nobody warns a man about. What is left over is not always a comfort. Sometimes what is left over is just the exact shape of what has gone.

You know this shed, even if yours is not a shed.

Yours might be the spare room with the crib still in it. It might be the closet of suits, or the shelf of textbooks for the course you were three modules into, or the second bedroom, or the calendar app that still has all of it in there and now just makes the phone buzz at you. Yours might be a whole kitchen that was built for four people to eat in.

The stuff stayed. The thing the stuff was for is gone.

Two things before we go any further, and I mean both of them. I am not going to tell you what the closing was for, because I do not know, and I am not going to hand you a reason wearing a kind face. And I am not going to walk you round your own shed pointing at everything you still have, as though the answer to losing a business is being reminded that you own a level.

This is not an inventory

The verse under this whole message is a strange one, and it is strange in the direction you need this week.

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.Isaiah 54:10

Look at what God does first. He grants it. He grants mountains departing, He grants hills being removed, and He does not spend one word arguing that the mountain was smaller than the man thinks, or explaining to him what the mountain was for.

Then He puts one thing in a completely different category.

Kindness. Covenant of peace. And covenant is not a mood word, it is a legal word, the strongest one in the Book. It means a thing settled outside the person it was made with, so that his bad week cannot get at it.

You have something this morning that was never resting on the business, and it is not the leftovers. Isaiah 54:10 puts the covenant on the far side of the mountains going, deliberately, in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one Scripture calls the seal on a person, which is language about a thing already fastened rather than a thing being weighed up. The tools were resting on the business. The plan for the next nine years was resting on the business. The covenant of His peace was resting on Him.

That is the difference between what remains and a consolation prize. A consolation prize is what is left when the real thing goes. A covenant was never in the same category as the real thing to begin with.

The shed is still full and I am not going to make you count it

There is a version of this message that would now walk you along that pegboard.

You still have your health. You still have your hands. You still have your wife, your kids, your name, your trade. And every one of those may be true, and none of it is what you need at twenty past eight on a Thursday standing in a doorway, because a man in that doorway does not need an audit. He needs somebody to stand there with him and not say anything clever for a minute.

So let me not be clever.

You are not being asked to be grateful this morning, and nothing in the written word puts that price on a hurting man. Isaiah 54 is spoken to a people in the middle of the loss, not on the far side of it, and the Spirit of God is described as the one who helps in our weakness rather than the one who marks us down for having any. Gratitude that gets squeezed out of a man on a bad Thursday is not gratitude. It is compliance.

And here is the part I do want you to have.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you up, whatever went back on the truck. What is written says His kindness does not depart, using the very verb it had just used for the mountains, so the contrast is the whole point of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old promise land on a man in a work shirt in his own yard. The business was holding your week. It was never holding you.

I do not know whether you will build again, and I will not pretend to. That is His, not mine, and not yours to have to decide standing in a doorway.