The Guitar Pick in the Coffee Tin

For the man who still keeps the pick, and has not touched the strings in longer than he would admit out loud.

Why has the pick stayed in the tin?

It's on the shelf above the kettle with the fuses, two keys nobody can place, a tape measure and about forty cents in loose change. The pick is worn on one corner where you used to hold it, and it's been in that tin for nine years, and you have thrown away a great deal of more useful stuff in that time.

You know where the guitar is too. Top of the wardrobe, in the soft case, with the strings you put on the week before you stopped. Those strings are older now than some of the people in your family.

A man who's finished with something clears the shelf. You've kept a worn pick through two house moves and a kitchen refit, which is not what finished looks like.

You never finished with this, you went quiet, and going quiet is not the same act. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God come without recall, and the Holy Spirit has kept something alive in you that a coffee tin has been guarding for nine years.

What One Remark Was Able to Do

It was probably brief. That's what people never believe about a sentence like the one you're carrying, because a thing that big ought to have taken longer to say.

Whoever said it was likely tired or distracted or thinking about something else entirely. There's a good chance they wouldn't recall it now if you read it back to them, and that isn't cruelty, it's just how it goes. A person almost never knows which of their sentences turned out to be load-bearing in somebody else's house.

Here is what it managed, though. It never said you had no ear, because that would have been something you could test. It put a small question mark over the whole business of a grown man with a guitar, and a question mark is much harder to answer than an accusation.

You were never told you lacked it, you were made to feel slightly foolish for having it. The written Word ties what God gives to His own calling rather than to anybody's tone of voice, and the Holy Spirit gives no gift on condition that nobody finds it faintly ridiculous.

Once you see that, you can see why the case went on top of the wardrobe so quickly. There was nothing in that remark to argue with. Skill you can defend. A raised eyebrow you cannot.

What the Way Back Does Not Require

Here's the actual price of taking the case down, and it's worth hearing in full, because you've been pricing it much higher for the best part of a decade.

Establishing who said it is no part of this. Ruling on what they meant is no part of it either. You don't have to raise it with them, clear the air, or wait for a day when somebody finally works out what one throwaway line cost.

Forgiveness will have its own season, brought by God rather than manufactured by you. No turnstile stands in front of a guitar. Nobody needs dealing with before you sound one chord in your own house.

You are free to take this up today without settling a single thing with whoever set it down. Scripture makes your gift a matter between you and God rather than a matter of one remark at a table, while the Holy Spirit waits on no conversation that may never happen.

That is the whole gate, and it has never once been locked from the other side. It is a wardrobe and an afternoon.

What Nine Years Have Not Done

There's a second weight on that case, and it isn't the remark. It's the nine years.

Something in you has worked out that a man who abandons a gift for that long has effectively resigned it, and that coming back now would be a scene. Not a loud scene. A quiet, private, deeply uncomfortable one, in which your own fingers tell you what you already suspect.

Look hard at what that reasoning actually claims. It claims God's gifts expire through disuse, and that a long enough silence cancels what He has put in a man. Neither of those is anywhere in Scripture, and the second is contradicted outright.

You have not run down a clock that God never started. The written Word says His gifts and calling come without recall, and the Holy Spirit keeps what He gave without reference to how long a case has been shut.

Your hands will be stiff and the strings will be dead and the first chord will sound terrible. All three of those are certainties rather than risks, and none of them is interesting. The fifth chord will be fine.

It is worth knowing why the fifth one will be fine, because it is not a matter of talent returning. Fingers keep what they learned. What they lose is callus and confidence, and both of those rebuild inside a week of ten minutes a day.

So the honest forecast is four bad chords in an empty room. Four chords is about forty seconds. Nine years have been guarded by forty seconds of noise that nobody else will ever hear.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Caleb This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.