It Was Hers And I Might Ruin It

The chair was your mother's, and that is the entire difficulty.

If it were any other chair you would have had a go at it years ago. It is a loose joint. It is glue and a clamp and an evening. People do it all the time.

But it is that chair, and if you get it wrong you have not made a mistake. You have lost something, and it does not come back, and there is no version of the afternoon where you get to try again.

So it sits in the spare room with a folded blanket over it, and it has been four years, and the joint is not getting better.

Let me put the true thing down before we go on. Not knowing how is not a character flaw. And being unwilling to gamble something irreplaceable in order to learn is not cowardice. That is a completely sound instinct and I am not going to argue with it. What I am going to argue with is the conclusion you have drawn from it, which is that you therefore cannot begin at all.

I was afraid, and hid it in the earth

There is a moment in one of the parables that is exactly this, and the thing to notice is what the man's reason was.

And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. (Matthew 25:25, King James Version)

He was not lazy and he was not a thief. He gives his reason plainly and it is fear, and what he did with the thing entrusted to him was keep it perfectly safe.

And that is what makes the parable so uncomfortable. The failure in it looks exactly like care. He protected it. He kept it in the same condition it arrived in. He handed it back undamaged.

You have been protecting something the way that man protected what he was given, and keeping a thing in perfect condition has never once been the same as keeping it well. Matthew 25:25 puts fear rather than carelessness at the center of that man's account, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that read as a warning about hiding rather than as contempt for the frightened.

I want to be careful, because this parable is about far more than furniture, and I am not going to turn a serious passage into a lesson about chairs. But the shape of it is real. A thing kept out of use in order to be kept safe stops doing what it was for.

You are looking after something that was made to be used, and a chair under a blanket has never once been closer to your mother than a chair somebody sits in. The Spirit of God is the one who can distinguish honoring from hiding, and it is written in Matthew that the reason given was fear and the result was a thing buried.

Learn on something worthless

Here is the way through, and it is so obvious that most people talk themselves past it.

Do not learn on the chair. Learn on something that does not matter at all, and then do the chair.

There is a loose joint on something in that house that nobody cares about. A kitchen chair from a discount store. A stool in the garage. A wobbly side table. A thing you would genuinely not mind destroying.

Do that one first. Get it wrong on that one. Use too much glue on that one and find out what happens.

You are able to make every mistake on something that costs nothing, and practicing on scrap has never once been a lesser way to learn than practicing on treasure. It is written in Matthew 25:25 that the fear produced a buried thing rather than a used one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person the third option they could not see.

Because the belief underneath four years of a blanket is that there are only two choices: risk it or protect it. There is a third and it has been available the whole time, and it is simply to become the person who can do it before you touch the thing that matters.

That is not delay. That is the ordinary route every person who repairs anything has taken, including the ones who look effortless.

Now the limit, and I say it here rather than in a footer. Never a gas appliance, never the breaker panel, never mains wiring, never a wall holding the building up, never a roof. Call a licensed professional and pay them properly. And if the piece that matters turns out to need real skill, that is also a call, and paying somebody to do it well is not a defeat. It is the same third option in a different coat.

You are entirely right to hand the precious one to somebody who does this every day, and paying a person to do it properly has never once been a failure to honor anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person peace about that decision, and Scripture puts the fault in the burying rather than in the asking for help.

Tonight, the worthless one

So here is the ask, and the treasured thing stays exactly where it is.

Practice on something worthless tonight, and leave the chair under the blanket.

Go and find the thing nobody cares about. Take it apart. Glue it wrong. Clamp it badly. Ruin it if that is what happens, and notice how completely fine the ruining is.

You are able to destroy something that does not matter and learn everything from it, and one wrecked garage stool has never once cost anybody anything. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a person in an ordinary practice run, and Matthew 25:25 names the burying as the thing that went wrong rather than the trying.

And I want to say something about the chair itself, because it deserves saying.

Your mother sat in that chair. She did not sit under a blanket in a spare room in it. If it ever gets fixed and comes back into the kitchen and somebody sits in it at Christmas, that is not a risk taken with her memory. That is her chair doing the thing it was always doing.

You have permission to want that chair in use rather than in storage, and a repaired joint has never once been able to take anything away from the woman who sat there. It is written in Matthew that fear put a thing in the earth, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room with you.