The Word Carved On The Paddle

The kitchen light at nine at night is the color of weak tea, and Ray is sitting under it with a sanding block in one hand.

The paddle lies across his knees. It came down off two hooks above the door, where it hung for eleven years and got dusted twice a year and otherwise got looked at the way you look at a photograph you have stopped seeing.

His uncle made it. Sol had hands like split firewood and no patience for anything that was not finished properly, and he shaped that blade over four evenings out of a plank he had been saving for something. On the fourth evening he took a chisel to the flat of it and cut one word into the grain, deep, so it would still be legible when the varnish went cloudy. Then he wrapped it in a bath towel and drove nine miles to give it to a nineteen year old who had just told him he believed.

Ray is forty one now. The word is still perfectly legible. That is the trouble.

He runs his thumb along the inside of the letters the way he has done since he was nineteen. The grooves are exactly where they have always been. They do not mean what they meant. Somewhere between that driveway and this kitchen the word got picked up by people he could not follow, and used in a room he had to walk out of, and printed on a sign he passes on the way to work, and every one of those things laid a little more weight on it until it will not carry anything anymore.

He is not angry at his uncle. That is the part nobody understands. Sol carved what he had. Sol meant every letter of it. Sol has been in the ground six years and there is nobody left to explain any of this to.

So Ray got the sanding block down from the shelf over the washing machine. Eighty grit. Twenty honest minutes and the blade would be blank, and a blank paddle can hang over a door forever without anybody asking one question about it.

He sits there a long time with the block in his hand.

The refrigerator cycles on, then off. The clock over the stove is a minute and a half fast and always has been.

What stops him is not sentiment. It is a small, stubborn, embarrassing fact. He still believes. Not the word. The thing. He believes it the way he believed it at nineteen in a driveway with a paddle wrapped in a bath towel, before he had heard one argument about any of it, and the belief did not go anywhere when the vocabulary did.

He sets the sanding block down on the table.

He picks the paddle up by the throat, the way his uncle showed him, and turns it so the light comes across the letters at an angle, and he says out loud, to nobody, in an empty kitchen at nine at night, two words.

"I believe."

Then he stops. He does not finish the sentence. There is nothing left to finish it with, and for the first time in about four years that does not feel like a failure. It feels like the truth said accurately, with the part he can no longer vouch for left off.

He carries it back and hangs it on the two hooks. Word side out.

The wood under the word

A man does not cut a word into a paddle unless he means it. Sol meant it. He meant it the way people mean things when they have one word, a chisel, and a nephew standing in a driveway with his hands in his pockets. So the ache in that kitchen is not that the word was a lie. The ache is that it was true, and then it traveled, and now it will not come clean.

Say the ache plainly, because it has earned plain speech. You lost the name for the thing. You did not lose the thing. Those are two different griefs and they have been sitting in the same chair for years, and one of them was never yours to carry.

Here is what is underneath the carving, and it was there long before the chisel. You are graven on the palms of His hands. Not written on. Cut in. Isaiah 49:16 is where it is written down, and it was the Holy Spirit who put that line through the prophet, and the same Spirit is carrying it across the table to you tonight. Sol carved wood. God carved Himself.

"Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me."Isaiah 49:16, KJV

Wood sands. That is simply the nature of wood and it is not a complaint about wood. Eighty grit, twenty minutes, and any word a man ever cut into a blade is dust on a kitchen floor. Palms do not sand. Whatever is graven into a hand stays graven, and the hands in that verse belong to the One who made the tree, and the man who shaped it, and the nephew standing in the driveway.

So hear this in the kitchen you are actually sitting in. You have not been unnamed. Something came off the front of you and it was never the part holding the weight. His word says your walls are continually before Him, continually, which is a word about tonight and not about a better season later, and it is His Spirit who brings that continually down out of the prophet and into a kitchen the color of weak tea.

There is a move available here that everybody expects, and it is the wrong one. Hand the man a new word. Give him a cleaner label, a better one, one that has not been in anybody's mouth on television. It would feel like help for about a month. Then the new word would go exactly where the old word went, because words travel and people carry them into rooms, and he would be back at this table with a different sanding block and the same silence.

So nothing new gets handed over here. What gets handed back is the thing itself, and it is already yours. It is written that the Lord knows them that are His, and the Spirit who put that sentence down does not stop to read a label on the way past it. You were His at nineteen in a driveway. You are His at forty one at a kitchen table, with a sanding block you did not use.

The word on the blade was pointing at something. Pointing is the entire job of a word. When a signpost gets knocked flat in a storm, the town it was pointing at does not move. Nobody stands in the road at midnight arguing that the town has ceased to exist because the sign is face down in the ditch. They step over the sign and they keep driving, because they know the road.

And you know the road. You have driven it in the dark for years now without the sign, and that is not a smaller faith, that is a faith that has been out in weather. Scripture says the trying of your faith works patience, and the Holy Spirit has been the one keeping you on the road through every mile you thought you were lost on it.

Nobody here is going to ask you what happened. That is the question everybody asks, and it turns a wound into a deposition. You do not owe an account of which room, which sign, which argument, which year, which person. The account was never being taken in the first place.

What is actually the point is small enough to carry in one hand. The thing you believed is standing. This is yours, right now, not returning and not pending. Hebrews 11:16 says God is not ashamed to be called their God, and the same Spirit who wrote that is in the room where you are sitting, and He is not embarrassed to be attached to a person who has run out of vocabulary.