The Pencil Still Has a Point

For the person whose sketchbook has been shut since one remark at a fundraiser, and who still keeps the pencils sharp.

It's about nine in the evening and the kitchen table is clear for the first time since the morning. The sketchbook is where it always is, on the shelf under the recipe books, with the charcoal pencils beside it in a tin.

You sharpened those pencils in the spring. Not because you were going to use them. You were tidying the tin, and a blunt charcoal pencil offended you. So you sat there a while with a sharpener and a piece of kitchen paper, doing something that makes no sense at all for a woman who has stopped drawing.

The book has forty pages used and about sixty blank. The last drawing in it is half a hand, done in a hurry, on the Sunday before the fundraiser.

A person who keeps the pencils sharp has not stopped, whatever they have told themselves about it. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God come without recall, and the Holy Spirit has kept something alive in you that a tin of sharpened charcoal has been quietly reporting for years.

What Was Actually Said, and What It Took

You can still hear it, which is how you know how deep it went. It was one sentence, said in front of two other people, in a hall with the lights on and a table of cakes behind you.

It wasn't a review of your work. That's the part worth getting straight, because you've filed it as one ever since. It was a remark about you, aimed sideways through something you'd made, and the person saying it was, in all likelihood, enjoying being funny more than they were thinking about you.

Here's what it took. Not your ability, which nobody assessed. It took the ordinariness of drawing. Up until that evening, a sketchbook on a kitchen table was simply part of an ordinary week. Afterward it became a claim about yourself that somebody in a hall might one day examine again.

You have not lost your hand, you have lost the right to do this casually. The written Word ties what God gives to His own calling rather than to a sentence in a hall, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a page nobody will ever see.

That distinction matters. Ability you could have practiced back. Ordinariness has to be taken back, and taking it back looks like one line on one page with nothing riding on it.

What This Does Not Require of You

Here's the price of opening the book tonight, and it's worth reading in full, because you've been quietly assuming a far higher one.

You don't have to establish who said it, though you know. You don't have to decide whether they meant it. You don't have to raise it, be reconciled first, or wait for a day when somebody works out what one funny sentence cost a woman with a sketchbook.

Forgiveness matters, and God leads a person to it in His own hour. No toll stands on the road between you and a sheet of paper. Nobody has to be dealt with before you draw a line in your own kitchen.

You are free to take this up tonight 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 remark at a fundraiser, while the Holy Spirit waits on no conversation that may never happen.

Nobody else has ever been standing in the way of this. It is a shelf, a tin, and about ten minutes.

What One Line Is Not Required to Be

There's a second weight on that book and it isn't the remark. It's what the first drawing would now have to be.

Some years have gone by, so a return can't just be a return. In your head it would have to be good, or at least good enough to justify the years, and it would have to prove that the sentence in the hall was wrong. That's an enormous amount of freight for a piece of charcoal to carry.

Look at what that does. It makes opening a sketchbook into a trial with you in the dock and a person who isn't even present acting as the judge. No wonder the book stays on the shelf.

You are free to draw one line tonight that has nothing to prove to anybody. The written Word makes a gift a matter of God's giving rather than of your performance, and the Holy Spirit is present at a kitchen table whether the drawing is any good or not.

Draw the salt cellar. Draw your own left hand, badly, the way everybody draws their own left hand. The page does not have to be shown, kept, or defended, and no one is coming to look at it.

There is a reason the left hand is the standard subject. It is always available, it never complains about the likeness, and it is difficult enough to occupy the part of you that would otherwise be judging.

Ten minutes of that is not a return to anything. It is a woman with charcoal on her fingers at half past nine, which is exactly what she was before a hall with the lights on got involved.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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