I Put the Tools Back in the Right Places

Everybody wants to hold the wrench. Nobody wants to hang it back on the board.

I have been keeping an eye on this for about a year and I would like to report that it is completely universal and applies to grown men as well as to me and to Sam Hollis, and I have watched three separate adults put a tool down on a bench instead of on the board and I did not say anything.

There is a board in our workshop with the shape of every tool painted on it. My grandfather did that. It is the most useful thing in that building and it means anybody can see what is missing in about two seconds.

The job I get is putting them back.

Not always, but mostly, because I am nine and I am not going to be the one adjusting a brake, and there is a natural arrangement where the person doing the interesting part hands things to the person doing the other part, and the other part is me.

I have felt a specific way about that and I am going to name it because I think a lot of people feel it and nobody says it. It is not exactly resentment. It is a suspicion that the arrangement is permanent, and that being the one who hangs things up is now a fact about what sort of person I am.

Here is what happened in March. Dad was doing the mower and had it in pieces and got called out to a cow, and he was gone about two hours, and when he came back everything was on the board and the parts were laid out in the order they came off with the bolts on top of the piece they belonged to.

He stood there for a while. Then he said the thing that I did not expect, which was to ask whether I wanted to do the reassembly with him rather than for him.

I said yes. It took the rest of the afternoon and I was not good at it.

Bucky came in halfway through with a rag in his mouth that had been on the bench, and neither of us knows where the rag went, and it is not on the board because there is no shape painted for a rag.

Where the diligent man ends up standing

The proverb is short and the picture at the end of it is worth looking at properly.

Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men. (Proverbs 22:29)

Diligent in his business. The word is about being quick and careful in ordinary work rather than about being brilliant at something. It is a description of how a person does the job in front of them.

And the promise attached is about where he ends up standing, which is not a reward, it is a consequence. A person who does ordinary work carefully ends up in different rooms, and the proverb states that as an observation about how the world runs.

You are being formed into somebody who ends up somewhere else by the way you do the job in front of you, and Proverbs 22:29 puts the standing downstream of the diligence. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as a promise rather than as a career tip.

The verse says nothing about the size of the business. It does not distinguish between a large job and a small one, and the word for business is about ordinary occupation.

You have not been assessed by which half of the job you were given. The written word attaches the whole promise to the manner rather than to the task, and His Spirit is what makes that distinction the difference between resenting a job and being formed by it.

The order that is actually being taught

There is a sentence in the gospels about scale that is easy to read as a warning and is really about training.

If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches? And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which is your own? (Luke 16:11, 12)

Read the second half. That which is another man's. Jesus names, as a specific stage, being faithful in something that belongs to somebody else, and puts it before having something of your own.

Which is a precise description of hanging up another man's tools. It is not a lesser job that a person is stuck with. It is named, in that order, as the thing that comes first.

You are in a stage rather than a category, and Luke 16:12 puts another man's things before your own on purpose. The Spirit of God is what makes that read as a road rather than as a ceiling.

And the whole passage is addressed to people who were being trusted with small amounts by somebody who intended to trust them with more.

You have been handed the small end by somebody with a plan for the other end. Luke 16:11 asks who would commit true riches to somebody untested, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a parable into a workshop with a painted board in it.