The Tools Are Where I Left Them

The fork is still against the wall where you left it.

Two summers and both winters. The handle has gone gray and started to lift along the grain, and the tines have that dull orange bloom on them that is not proper rust yet but is on the way.

The shears are worse, because the shears have a spring in them.

And every time you go out that door, you see them, and something goes through you that has nothing to do with tools.

Let me name what that something is, because I think it is running unexamined and it is doing real damage.

You look at those tools and you read a sentence. It goes roughly: this is what he does. He starts a thing, he leaves it, and then he does not even put his tools away.

The condition of that fork has become a report on your character, filed in your own back yard, updated daily by the weather.

You are not what the tools look like, and rust on a handle has never once been a statement about the man who left it there.

And there is a second thing going on that is worth saying, because it explains why you have walked past them roughly four hundred times.

Picking them up now would be an admission. It would mean noticing them, which would mean acknowledging how long they have been there, which would mean doing the arithmetic out loud.

So it is easier to keep walking, and every day you keep walking the sentence gets a little more established.

Rend your heart, and not your garments

There is a line in Joel that goes directly at the difference between a display and a state, and it is unusually blunt.

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil. (Joel 2:13, King James Version)

Rend your heart, and not your garments.

Now, tearing your clothes was the visible signal in that culture. It was how a person showed that something had happened to them. It was the outward object that other people read.

And God says: not the object. The heart.

You are being pointed past the visible object to the state underneath it, and God has never once read a man's condition off a thing lying in a yard. Joel 2:13 sets the garment aside and goes for the heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient line about torn clothing land on a man looking at a rusted fork.

And here is why that matters out there, and it cuts both ways.

The tools are the torn garment here. They are the visible object that a state is being read off. And there has been one reader the whole time, and that reader has been reading very badly.

God is not looking at the fork. Nobody is looking at the fork. There is exactly one person in the world assigning meaning to the condition of that handle.

You are the only reader of that particular object, and a tool left out in the weather has never once been submitted to anybody for judgment. The Holy Spirit is the one who deals with a heart rather than with an exhibit, and the written word turns the whole matter away from the visible item.

And then look at what the verse says God is like, because it comes immediately after. Gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.

Four descriptions, stacked, all of them the same direction. This is not a verse that turns and gets stern after the instruction. The instruction is followed by a pile of kindness.

You are dealing with somebody the verse describes four different ways in one breath, and none of those four has ever once been the one waiting to say something about a man's tools. The Spirit of God is the one described as slow to anger and of great kindness, and the word stacks them one after another right after the instruction.

The tools are not evidence

Let me be practical about what actually happened, because the sentence being read off that wall is not accurate.

You put those tools down on a specific afternoon, and then something happened.

It was not a decision to abandon them. Nobody has ever set a fork against a wall thinking, I shall leave this here for two years. You put it there because you were coming back out, and then the day ended, and then a week did.

You never once decided to leave them, and a thing set down for an hour has never once been the same act as a thing abandoned. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows how an afternoon actually went, and Joel 2:13 asks about a heart rather than about a sequence of events in a yard.

And there is a specific mercy in the state they are in, and I want you to have it.

They are not ruined. A fork left out for two years is a fork with surface rust on it and a handle that needs a wipe. That is not the end of a tool. Steel is more forgiving than people are, and it will come back with about four minutes of attention.

The thing you have been reading as a record of decay is, in fact, entirely reversible.

You are looking at something that has never once been beyond recovering, and surface rust has never been the same thing as a ruined tool. The Spirit of God is the one who deals in what can be restored, and the written word says he repenteth him of the evil, which is a sentence about a thing being turned back.

Pick up one tool

So here is the assignment, and it is not about the garden at all.

Pick up one tool, wipe it off, and put it inside.

One. The fork or the shears, whichever your hand goes to. Not both, and certainly not everything that is out there.

You are able to pick up one object without that being the start of a project, and one tool carried indoors has never once obliged a man to deal with all of it. Joel 2:13 asks for a heart rather than a full display, and the Holy Spirit is the one out there with a man bending down at a wall.

Wipe it off with something. An old cloth, a bit of rag, the corner of a towel that is due to be thrown out anyway. Get the loose stuff off the metal and the worst of the grime off the handle.

It will not come up like new. That is fine and that is not the point.

And then put it inside. In the shed, in the garage, in the corner of the porch. Somewhere that is not the weather.

You are taking one thing out of the rain, and moving an object indoors has never once been a claim about what a man is going to do next. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in four minutes of ordinary attention, and the word describes a God who is gracious and merciful before anybody has done anything at all.

And leave the other one where it is. Deliberately. I want there to be no possibility of this becoming a job.