Borrowing Back The Tools He Gave Away

He gave the long plane to the man across the road.

The good chisels went to his cousin down the valley, in the roll, with the leather still oiled. The level went to a young fella who was just starting out and could not afford one. The block plane, the coping saw, the marking gauge his father made, all of it went, and he did not sell any of it, and that matters to him.

He gave it away because he was sure.

Not vaguely sure. Sure the way a man is sure about the tide. He had been told something, and he had believed it all the way down to his hands, and a man who believes something all the way down to his hands does not keep a shed full of tools he will not be needing.

So the shed emptied out over about five weeks, and it felt like the freest thing he had ever done, and he would tell you honestly that those were some of the best weeks of his life.

Then the season went by and nothing came.

And this is the part he did not see coming, because nobody plans the part after.

He has been getting them back one at a time.

Not asking for them back. Borrowing them. The man across the road has the long plane and there is no world in which he asks for it back, so when there is a door to hang he walks up the road and knocks and says, could I borrow the plane a couple of days.

He has had to say that sentence out loud eleven times now in two years, and every single person has said yes straight away, and not one of them has ever asked.

That is the part that gets him. Not one of them has ever asked. Which means all of them know.

If there is something you gave away because you were sure, come and sit on the bench in the yard here a minute. There is a flask.

The verse that keeps a yet in every sentence

There is a passage where a man lists what a season did to him, and he refuses to finish a single sentence on the damage.

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.2 Corinthians 4:8-9

Four sentences. Four hits. And a hinge in the middle of every one of them.

He does not say the trouble was not real. He names it, four times over, and the naming is not softened. Troubled. Perplexed. Persecuted. Cast down, which is the language of a man on the ground.

And then, every time, that small word turning the sentence.

You are cast down, and the word will not let the sentence end there, and that hinge belongs to you. 2 Corinthians 4:9 puts the yet in the middle of a man on the ground rather than in place of him, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the naming and the turn in the same breath, which means what happened in your shed gets to be told honestly and it does not get the last clause.

The giving was not the mistake

Let us be careful here, because there is a wrong lesson lying around this story and a lot of people would hand it to you.

The wrong lesson is that you should have held on to your tools.

That is not the lesson and it is not true. A man who gives away a marking gauge his father made, because he believed God about something, has done a bigger thing than a man who kept his shed tidy.

The timing was wrong. The giving was not wrong.

You have a heart that gave its own tools away on the strength of a word, and that heart is not the problem in this story. Scripture never once rebukes the widow for the two mites on the grounds that she might need them later, and it is the Spirit of God who moves a person to open their hands in the first place, so the impulse that emptied that shed came from a good place and it went out through good hands.

Timing, not faith. That is the distinction that will let you sleep. Say it in the yard. Timing, not faith.

Eleven times up the road

Now the knocking, because the knocking is the wound and everybody has been politely ignoring it.

Eleven times you have walked up a road you gave something away on, and asked for the loan of it back, and every time a door has opened and a person has said yes without a flicker. You have been reading that as eleven small humiliations.

You were being carried up that road every one of those eleven times, and a door that opens without a question is not a door that is judging you. Psalm 37:23 says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and it is written of a man who has already stumbled in the very next verse, and the same Spirit who orders a step orders the one that goes uphill to a neighbor's door with a request in its mouth.

Eleven yeses. Nobody asked. That is not a valley full of people waiting for you to admit something. That is a valley full of people who love you and have decided, quietly and all on their own, never to make you say it.