The Steps I Kept Putting Off

Since the spring, and it is October.

The second one is the bad one. It gives about an inch when you put weight on the outer edge, and everybody in the house knows to step on the inside, and that is a thing a family learns without anybody ever saying it out loud, which is how you know it has been a long time.

He is forty nine and he could fix it in an afternoon.

He has done, since the spring: a gate at number eleven. A run of guttering at number four. The mother of somebody at the school, whose boiler he did not fix but whose plumber he stood beside for an hour so that she would not be alone with a man giving her a number. Two fence panels. A washing machine. A car that needed a jump at half past six in the morning.

That is not vanity either. He does not talk about any of it, and if you said something he would change the subject with real discomfort.

And his own back steps have been rotten since March.

His wife mentioned it in June and he said he would get to it, and she has not mentioned it since, and that is the part that has been sitting in him, because she is not being passive about it. She has simply concluded, correctly, that it is not going to happen, and she has stopped raising it the way you stop raising the weather.

He was standing in the yard on Saturday with a bag of tools he was taking somewhere else and he looked at the steps, and something went through him that he did not like.

The light in a back yard in October at about five is very good and very short, and he stood in it holding a bag.

There is one line in a letter of Paul's that is about as unglamorous as Scripture gets.

Work with your own hands

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally hands over a rebuke. Your own family should come first. Charity begins at home. He is running from something. I am not going to do any of that. A man who has spent seven months helping people has not done anything wrong, and turning his own back steps into an accusation is how a small job becomes a large silence.

Paul writes: And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

It is a strange instruction and it is deliberately unglamorous. Study to be quiet. Do your own business. Work with your own hands.

Read the last one as literally as it is written. Not: work hard. Not: be useful. Work with your own hands, which in that letter is about a person's actual life, their actual trade, their actual household, rather than about a wider stage.

You have been given your own hands and your own business as the assignment. That is not me shrinking Paul's meaning; 1 Thessalonians 4:11 uses own twice in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter chose a possessive rather than a general call.

And notice what the next verse says the point of it is: That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing (1 Thessalonians 4:12). Have lack of nothing. The instruction is aimed at a household not going short.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Why other people's gates are easier

Now the thing that is actually going on, because it is not selfishness and it is not avoidance in the way people mean it.

Somebody else's gate is a closed problem. You go, you fix it, somebody thanks you, you drive home, and the whole thing has a beginning and an end and a clear verdict at the finish.

His own steps are not that. His own steps sit inside a house with a marriage in it and a June conversation in it and seven months of not doing it in it, and by October they are not a carpentry job any more, they are a conversation about what has been happening in that house since March.

So the bag of tools goes to number eleven, because number eleven is achievable and the back steps are not.

You have never been running from your family; you have been running toward a finish line. Luke 10:42 has one thing named as needful in a house full of activity, and the difficulty there was also that the doable was crowding out the necessary; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is not accusing a man of not caring.

This is yours right now, standing in your own yard with a bag in your hand: an instruction with the word own in it twice. 1 Thessalonians 4:11 makes the business and the hands both possessive; the Spirit who inspired that line was not describing anybody's reputation.

The thing she stopped mentioning

Let me name the part that is actually costing, because it is not the timber.

She mentioned it in June and has not since. That is not resentment. It is a small, quiet adjustment in what she expects, and it has been made, and it was made without any argument, and it is the sort of thing that a marriage accumulates about six of before anybody notices.

Two new steps will not undo that. Nothing on this page pretends otherwise. But two new steps are a real thing done in the actual place, and the adjustment she made in June was about a real thing too.

You were never asked to fix a marriage with a saw; you were asked to do the thing in front of you. 1 Thessalonians 4:11 says work with your own hands and stops there, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter did not attach a repair project to it.

Fruit is not output, and a rotten step is where the difference lands. Output is the list: a gate, guttering, two panels, a washing machine, a jump start, all of them real, all of them finished. Fruit is what grows in a house where somebody did the unglamorous thing at home, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, at number eleven or in his own yard.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes while the light is still in the yard, tell Him one true thing about the seven months with nothing asked for and nothing promised. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody inspects that.