His Eye Was Not Dim

They did it well, which is the thing that has made it impossible to object to.

Nobody said anything about his age. Nobody said anything at all, in fact, which is how these things are done properly: there was a reorganization, and in the reorganization somebody had to take the quality role, and it went to the person with the most experience, and that is him, and everybody agreed it was obvious.

And now he has a clipboard.

He is sixty six. He trained three of the five men on that crew. The tall one has been with him nine years and could not cut a rafter when he arrived. He built the roof on the school in two thousand and four with two of them and a boy who is now somebody's foreman in another county.

And on Monday he watched the tall one measure something wrong, and he did not say anything for eleven seconds, because it took him that long to work out what his job now is, which is apparently to notice it and write it down and mention it later.

The clipboard is fine. The role is a real role and it matters and he is good at it.

And he has not said one word to anybody, including his wife, about what it felt like standing on that ground on Monday with a pencil behind his ear.

He is not angry with anybody. He wants that understood. There is nobody to be angry with; the reorganization was sensible, and the person who did it likes him, and if you asked all five of that crew whether they respect him they would look at you as though you had asked something stupid.

It is just that something has moved and nobody named it, and a thing that is not named cannot be answered.

The site at the end of the day, when the light comes flat across the scaffolding and everything goes gold and orange, is the part of this work he has always loved.

There is one verse at the very end of Deuteronomy that is a strange thing for a book to record.

His eye was not dim

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally promises. They will realize. You will be back on the tools. God will restore it. I am not going to say any of that. Nobody talking to a man about God has been authorized to forecast a reversal, and a man of sixty six who is handed one will spend two years waiting for a conversation that is not coming.

Deuteronomy ends with Moses dying on a mountain, and the writer records his age, and then adds a detail that nobody had to include: And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated (Deuteronomy 34:7).

Read what is being said and, more to the point, why it is being said at all.

It is not necessary information. The man has died; nothing turns on the state of his eyesight. And yet somebody thought it was worth writing down, on the last page, that the capacity was still there when he went.

The text is refusing an assumption. Everybody reading it will have assumed a hundred and twenty means diminished, and the text says no, not this man, not at the end.

You have not been measured by anybody who is required to record what is still there. That is not me overreading; Deuteronomy 34:7 includes a detail the narrative does not need, and the Holy Spirit who preserved it put it there so that nobody would round a man's last chapter down.

And notice where he was when it happened. Up a mountain. He climbed Nebo, from the plains of Moab, at a hundred and twenty, on the day he died.

And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.Deuteronomy 34:7

Nobody named it

Now the thing that is actually going on, because it is not the clipboard.

A role changed for reasons that were operationally sensible and nobody said one word about age, and that is exactly why it cannot be answered. If somebody had said it, he could have replied. Nothing was said, so there is nothing to reply to, and a man is left holding an implication he cannot quote back to anybody.

That is the specific injury of how it is done well.

You have never been given a verdict that anybody would put their name to. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart, and the outward appearance is precisely what a reorganization sees; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) reads what no organizational chart records.

This is yours right now, standing on a site with everybody gone: a capacity that a change of role did not remove. Psalm 92:14 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age and shall be fat and flourishing; the Spirit who inspired that psalm did not attach it to a job title.

Eleven seconds on Monday

Let me stay with the eleven seconds, because that is the moment and he has been carrying it since.

He saw the measurement go wrong. He knew immediately. And he did not speak, because it took him eleven seconds to work out what a man in his position is now supposed to do, and by the time he had worked it out the moment for speaking had gone.

Here is what those eleven seconds actually prove. His eye was not dim. He saw it, instantly, from where he was standing, and the delay was not in the seeing, it was in the working out of his own standing to say so.

That is not a decline. That is a man whose competence is entirely intact and whose confidence has been quietly interfered with, and those are completely different problems, and only one of them is about age.

You were not slower on Monday; you were less certain that you were allowed. 2 Timothy 1:6 tells a man to stir up the gift that is in him, which is language about a thing already present and banked rather than a thing lost; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter addressed a man who had gone quiet rather than a man who had run out.

Fruit is not output, and a build site is where it shows. Output is the role and the title and who signs off the work. Fruit is what has grown on a man who taught three of the five people standing on that ground, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, on the tools or holding a clipboard.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes at the end of the day when they have all gone, tell Him one true thing about Monday with nothing asked for. Not a request for the role back. One true thing. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody records that.