The Letters in the Desk Drawer

For the person with a drawer full of beautiful letters and no intention of ever showing one to anybody.

You never actually stopped. That's the part nobody knows, including, most of the time, you.

There are eleven sheets in the second drawer of that desk. Alphabets, mostly. A serif you've been refining for about six years without ever finishing it. A set of numerals that finally came right last autumn. One line from a psalm, drawn four times, whose spacing you have never got the way you wanted it.

What stopped was the showing. You used to letter a sign for the summer fair, a name on a card, a heading for somebody's order of service. You haven't done one of those since the year somebody described your work, pleasantly, as fussy.

The gift never went anywhere, only the showing of it did, and those are different losses. Scripture tells a man to stir up the gift that is in him rather than send for a new one, and the Holy Spirit has been at work in that drawer through every year you called this finished.

What the Word Fussy Was Able to Do

That word, fussy, is a small one doing enormous work, which is why it's stayed with you for years while larger criticisms have fallen off.

It doesn't say your lettering is bad. Nobody could have said that and been believed, including the person who said this. It says the care itself is the problem. Too much attention. A man taking longer over a serif than a reasonable person would.

That's almost impossible to answer, because any answer proves the point. Explaining why the spacing matters is exactly what a fussy man would do. So you didn't explain. You kept doing the work and stopped letting it out of the drawer, which was the only move that didn't require a defense.

You were never told the letters were poor, you were told the care was excessive. The written Word calls it the gift of God which is in you, and the Holy Spirit gives nothing on condition that nobody finds it too careful.

Look at what survived, though. The care did. Six years of a serif nobody has seen is not a man who took the criticism to heart. It's a man who took it to a drawer.

What the Way Back Does Not Require

Here's what it costs to let one sheet out of that drawer, and the list is shorter than you've been assuming.

Establishing who said it forms no part of this. Deciding what they meant forms no part of it. You don't have to raise it, or be at peace about it first, or wait for a day when somebody understands what one light word did to a decade of summer fairs.

Forgiveness has a place here and God knows its hour. It is not a checkpoint standing between you and a card. Nobody needs settling before you letter a name for somebody who asked.

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

No one else has ever been holding this shut. It is a drawer handle and an afternoon.

Who a Private Gift Is Not Serving

There's a second thing in that drawer besides the sheets, and it's worth naming kindly.

A gift kept private is safe. Nobody can call an unseen alphabet fussy. Nobody can look at a sign you never made and find it overdone. Every year the work gets better and every year fewer people see it, and from the inside that feels like discipline rather than what it actually is.

Meanwhile the summer fair has a printed banner with letters nobody chose. The order of service has a heading in a font somebody picked from a list in nine seconds. None of that is a tragedy, and none of it is your fault. It is also the honest cost column, which nobody ever showed you.

You have a gift given for other people, and it is not finished while it stays in a drawer. The written Word says the gift is in you and tells you to stir it up, and the Holy Spirit moves work out of a private room toward the people it was always for.

That's not a rebuke. It's a door, and it opens in the direction of one card for one person, not a return to everything at once.

It is worth being concrete about what one card costs. Twenty minutes, a nib you already own, and a name you already know how to space. Nobody has to be told you are doing it and nothing has to be explained afterward.

That is the smallest possible version of coming back, and it is deliberately small. A decade of private practice does not need a large re-entry. It needs one piece of card leaving the house.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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