The Sawhorse in the Open Barn Door

For the carpenter whose hands go stupid the moment the apprentice stops sweeping and looks up.

You've dragged the sawhorse into the barn doorway, which is where the light is best in the afternoon, and you've got a half cut joint sitting on it that you were perfectly happy with an hour ago.

The lad is at the far end with a broom. He's been sweeping the same four feet for about three minutes, which is what a seventeen year old does when he's building up to asking a question, and you know exactly which one is coming.

Here's what happens next, because it has happened eleven times this year. He'll ask to see how you do that. You'll say yes. Your hands will pick up a saw they have held for thirty years and will suddenly hold it like an object they've never met.

Keeping a sawhorse between you and an open barn door is not practicality and it is not habit, it is fear of somebody walking up, and that is what gets answered here. Scripture says God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, of a sound mind, while the Holy Spirit shows no impatience with a man whose hands lock under a gaze.

Naming What Actually Happens to the Hands

Be exact about this, because being handed the wrong description is part of why it hasn't shifted.

Your hands are not the problem. They cut that joint yesterday without any supervision from you at all, the way a man's hands do a job they've done ten thousand times. That's the whole point of thirty years.

With the boy watching, the work becomes a demonstration, and a demonstration has to be narrated. Suddenly there's a voice in your head explaining the cut, and your hands start taking instruction from that voice instead of from thirty years, and that voice has never cut a joint in its life.

You are not revealed as lacking by being watched, you are interrupted in what you already have. The written Word says God gave power, love and a sound mind rather than fear, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the part of you that seizes under an honest, friendly gaze.

That matters, because the usual advice assumes a man is hiding a weakness. You're not hiding a weakness at all. You're protecting a skill that works best when it runs by itself.

What Putting Him Off Is Buying

Give the deflection its due, because it does something real and you've been doing it for a reason.

Every time you say later, or next week, or when we've got the other job off the bench, nothing gets fumbled. The boy's picture of you stays exactly as it is, which is a man who can do anything with a saw. That's worth something to you, and it's probably worth something to him too.

Here's the other column. He's seventeen and he's cutting joints that split, and the one thing that would fix it is watching a competent man's hands for four minutes. Eleven deflections this year is eleven afternoons he's spent guessing.

You are protecting a picture of yourself with the thing he most needs. Scripture puts power and a sound mind together in the same gift, and the Holy Spirit steadies a man's hands under a gaze rather than pretending the gaze is nothing.

Nothing here asks you to teach a class or become somebody comfortable with an audience. One lad, one joint, four minutes in a doorway.

What a Bad Cut in Front of Him Would Cost

Count the risk honestly, because the fear has been charging you all year and has never shown its arithmetic.

If your hands go stiff and you cut a poor joint in front of him, here's the realistic spread. He learns more from the bad one than from a good one, because a bad cut shows him where the fault lives. You cut a second one and it's fine, and he's watched a man recover, which is worth more than watching a man be flawless. He doesn't notice anything is wrong at all, which is the likeliest outcome, because seventeen year olds are not forensic.

Not one of those ends with a boy revising his view of you. That's what the fear keeps implying, and it has never once been required to justify it.

You are not on trial as a carpenter because one cut came out stiff in front of a boy. The written Word names a sound mind as part of what God gave, and the Holy Spirit uses it to show a situation at its real size rather than at the size dread reports.

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.