The Toolbox That Went to Texas

There is a wall in that shed with the shapes still drawn on it in marker, because that is how his father taught him and that is how he taught his boy.

The right hand side is fine. The right hand side is a working wall. Left hand side has four outlines on it with nothing hanging inside them, and it has been like that since the spring before last.

His brother is nine years younger and has always been the one things happen to. There was a job coming up, and it was a real job, and he needed the gear for it and he needed a bit to get down there and start, and it was not even a difficult conversation. It took about ninety seconds in this same shed, and the two of them loaded the truck, and there was a joke about the level, and he stood in the yard and watched him pull out.

That was the last time he saw him.

They talk. That is the strange part. Twice a year, birthdays, and it is warm, and it is completely normal, and neither of them says one word about it. He knows the job did not go the way it was meant to. He knows there was a woman and then there was not a woman. He has heard, from their mother, that things are better now.

And he comes out here on a Saturday morning to fix something, and he opens the left hand side of the shed knowing exactly what is not in it, and looks at four outlines drawn in marker, and closes it again.

He has never once mentioned it to his wife. She knows. Of course she knows. But he has never said it out loud in his own house.

You know that wall. Yours might be a spare room, or a bank statement from a particular month, or a photograph you turn over. Somebody you love took something and did not bring it back, and the thing itself is not really the thing, and every so often you go and check that the gap is still the shape it was.

Come on and sit on the bench. The light is good this time of the evening. There is one line here I want to read you, and most people quote half of it.

There is no code, and there is a lending with no hook in it

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this place promises a secret and I am not going to hold a man in a shed with a hint of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that gets your gear back from three states away. Nothing here is a technique, and if letting go were a way of making a man pay up, it would not be letting go, it would just be patience with a hook in it, and God does not fish for anybody like that.

Here is the line, and I want the whole of it, including the part that gets left off.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.Luke 6:35

Now. Most men hear reward shall be great and hear money. Read on one clause. Jesus tells you, in the same breath, exactly what the reward is: ye shall be the children of the Highest. The reward is resemblance. You end up like Him. That is the whole of it, and it is not a rate of return, it is a family likeness.

And look at the reason He gives, right at the end, because it is the plainest sentence about God in that chapter. He is kind to the unthankful. Not kind and then disappointed. Kind, as a settled disposition, toward people who did not say thank you and were never going to. If you have been waiting for your brother to become thankful before you can set this down, you are waiting for a condition that God Himself does not require in order to keep being good to anybody, including you.

You are not owed a change in him before you are allowed to be free, and nothing here waits on his thankfulness. That is not a soft word I am handing you on a bench. It is written into Luke 6, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about lending and lays it across four outlines drawn on a shed wall in marker.

You have a God who is kind to the unthankful, and He has never once been repaid by anybody, including you. Scripture says it in exactly those words, and His Spirit is the one who takes them and lets a man's jaw come unset.

Now let me say the true thing, since we are sitting.

It is not the tools. You could replace those in a fortnight if you wanted and you have not, and you know why you have not: because replacing them would mean the gap is closed and the story is finished. The outlines are the last place your brother is still standing in this shed.

And underneath that, the harder one. You loaded that truck in ninety seconds because you have been the one who loads the truck since you were both boys, and somewhere in you there is a quiet account that says you have always given and he has always taken, and if you let this go you are letting go of the last piece of evidence for a thing you have never once said out loud in forty years.

You are not carrying pettiness, and the ache under that wall is not a small thing. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written word like nigh and puts it beside a man on a bench who is not going to cry about it.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a shed wall does not change because a man had a think about it on a Saturday. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what putting up with it never does. So say it out loud in the shed, where nobody is going to hear you. You have the standing to speak to a thing you have carried and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your standing rather than your patience, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word out past a shed door.