The Hands That Teach Now

The workshop still smells the way it always smelled, which is the part that undoes him some afternoons. Wax and cut leather and the particular dust that comes off a wooden last when you rasp it. There are ninety of those lasts on the shelf behind him, each one carved to somebody's actual foot, some of them belonging to people who have been dead for twenty years, and he has never been able to throw one out.

Two apprentices at the bench. One of them has hands like a bear and does everything too hard. The other is careful to the point of being slow and will be the better maker of the two, though neither of them knows it yet and he has not said so.

He made boots in this room for thirty one years. Then there was an injury that got infected, and then something else went wrong behind that, and by the time anyone had a name for it he had lost nine years to hospitals and waiting rooms and a chair by a window in his sister's house. He is back on his feet now, mostly. What did not come back is the fine control. He can hold a knife. He cannot trust the hand at the end of a cut, and a welt does not forgive a hand you cannot trust.

So this is his day now. He sets the work up, he watches, he says stop, he says look at where the grain turns, he says feel that, no, feel it, put your thumb there. The bear-handed one is getting better because of him. The careful one is getting faster because of him. Anyone standing in the door would say this is a workshop that is working.

And in his own head, all day long, runs a sentence he has never said out loud to either of them: this is not the job. The job was making boots. This is what they let you do after.

He has decided, without ever putting it to a vote, that teaching is the smaller half. That whatever he was actually for was used up in those thirty one years and finished off by the nine, and that what is happening at this bench is a kind of gentle retirement dressed up in an apron.

Maybe you have made the same decision about your own days without noticing you made it. The years took something, and what is left is real work with real people in it, and you have quietly filed it under afterward. You are not living in the afterward of your own life. It is written in Exodus 35:34 that God put teaching into a craftsman's heart deliberately, in the same passage that describes the skill in his hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that workshop with you every afternoon while you counted it as a lesser thing.

God put it in his heart on purpose

Here is the anchor, and where it sits in the story is the whole point.

And He has put in his heart the ability to teach, in him and Aholiab the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan.Exodus 35:34

That is Bezalel. The man God named out loud for the building of the tabernacle, the one Exodus 31:3 says was filled with the Spirit of God in wisdom and understanding and knowledge and all manner of workmanship. The finest pair of hands in the camp, by direct appointment.

And in the same breath, in the same list of what God had put in him, is this: He put it in his heart to teach.

Not later. Not when the hands went. Not as an arrangement for a craftsman past his best. The teaching went in at the same time as the skill, from the same Spirit, by the same decision, and Scripture treats it as one gift and not as a gift with a spare wheel in the trunk. Nobody in that camp thought Bezalel had been moved sideways. You have something in you that God put there on purpose, and it was never the substitute for the other thing. That is what is written in Exodus 35:34, where the teaching is listed as something He put in rather than something a man fell back on, and it is the same Spirit named two chapters earlier as the source of the skill in his hands.

And usefulness is not the proof of anything

Now I have to be careful with you, because this is the category where these articles most often do harm.

Nothing on this page says you are restored because you are useful. That would be a terrible sentence and it is not what is happening at that bench. If your hands had gone and there were no apprentices, if there were no workshop and no lasts on the shelf and nothing at all to show anybody, God would be restoring you at exactly the same rate, because His restoring is not a payment for output and never has been. A person whose capacity is genuinely smaller now is not further back in the line. He does not price a person by the hour.

So hold both of these at once, because they are both true. The teaching is real work and not a consolation. And the work is not your receipt.

Restored is not replaced. Replaced would be somebody handing you back the hand you had at twenty six, and nobody is doing that, and this page is not going to imply it in a soft voice at the end. Restored is God putting a man back into the room and into the work with the hands he actually has, which is a slower and stranger and much deeper thing than a repair.

You are being put back to work in the body you have now, and that is not the reduced version of the plan. 2 Corinthians 12:9 says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and note that Paul does not say the weakness gets removed first; it is the Holy Spirit who does the perfecting, in a man who cannot trust his hand at the end of a cut.