Still Sanding a Finished Hull

The boat has been finished since April.

Anyone who comes into that shed can see it. It sits on the trestles with the light off the water moving across it, and the lines are right, and the joins are the kind of joins that people who know boats stop and look at for a while without saying anything. His uncle came down in May and put his hand on the sheer and said one word and left, and that word has been the best thing that has happened to Keoni in about a decade.

It is August. He is still sanding.

Not repairing. There is nothing wrong with it. He is running finer and finer paper over a surface that was already smooth in April, going over the same three feet of the starboard side that he has now gone over so many times he could sand it in his sleep, and he goes down there in the evenings after work and does it, and his wife has stopped asking when it goes in the water.

She asked once, in June, and he said something about the weather and the tide and a bit of hardware he was waiting on, and none of it was a lie exactly and all of it was untrue, and they both heard it.

Here is the thing, and I am not going to hurry past it, because it is a real wound and it deserves to be named before anybody lifts it.

Keoni has never in his life had a thing be finished and stay finished. He grew up in a house where nothing was ever settled: not the money, not whether his father was coming back, not whether the good week was the start of something or the last of it. He learned before he was eight that a completed thing is a thing about to be taken, and that the only safe posture is one more pass with the paper. Because while you are still working on it, nobody can tell you it is over.

So when I say to you, as I am about to, that Christ finished it, understand that I know what I am asking. For some people that is good news arriving. For a man like this it is a small terror, and it is honest to say so.

You may have your own hull. Something in your life, or something in your soul, that has been done for a long time and that you keep going back over, because putting the paper down would mean it is finished, and finished things have never been safe for you.

The word Paul uses is not encouragement, it is a state

And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.Colossians 2:10

Ye are complete. Not: you will be, once the finish is right. Not: you are nearly. The verb is a plain report of an existing condition, and the location of that condition is given in two words: in him.

Which is the part that matters most for a man in a shed. Paul does not say you are complete in yourself, which would be absurd and which nobody could believe about themselves for ten minutes. He says the completeness is in Christ, and you are in Christ, and therefore the completeness is your address rather than your achievement.

You are complete in Him, and it is already the case, and it is a condition rather than a result you are still working toward. I am not offering comfort to a man who is afraid of finishing. It is written in Colossians 2:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a plain report and lays it on somebody with a sanding block in his hand in August.

What the sanding is protecting

Now let me be gentle and specific about the fear underneath it, because it is not laziness and it is not perfectionism, whatever people call it from the doorway.

It is protection. As long as the boat is unfinished, it cannot be judged, it cannot fail, it cannot be taken, and it cannot disappoint anybody. Unfinished is the safest state a thing can be in, and a man who learned early that finished things get taken will keep everything he loves in that state forever, including his own standing with God.

But look at the verse again. The completeness is not in the boat and it is not in Keoni. It is in Christ, and Christ is described in that same sentence as the head of all principality and power, which is Paul's way of saying: nothing outranks Him and nothing can come and take this off the trestles.

You are held in a completeness nothing outranks, and it is already secured, and there is no one above Him who can come and reopen it. Scripture calls Him the head of all principality and power, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that written line land as safety in a man who has never once been safe in a finished thing.

What a boat is for

And here is the kind thing, the thing his uncle would say if he were a talker, which he is not.

A boat that never goes in the water is not being protected. It is being wasted. The sanding is not care at this point; it is a way of keeping a good thing on land where it cannot be enjoyed by anybody, including the man who built it.

And a salvation that is never rested in is the same. It does not become more secure by being gone over. It just never gets used for what it is for, which is a life lived in the open with God, in the water, moving.

You are meant to be in the water, and it is already seaworthy, and the finishing was done by hands better than yours. It is written that you are complete in Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from the shed to the slipway without ever shaming him for how long he stayed.