The Whole Project Was Mine

There is a notebook on the shelf above that bench and it has nine years of him in it.

Not a journal. He would not keep a journal; he would find it embarrassing. It is a project book, the same kind he has used all his working life, ruled and numbered, and it contains, in his own small handwriting, a nine year attempt to build a better man out of himself.

There are objectives. There are review dates, roughly quarterly, though they slipped badly in the middle years. There is a page from the second year with a list of what he calls areas, and beside each one a target state, and beside that a series of assessments in different pens, going down the page and getting shorter as the years pass, until the entries in the last two years are single words and most of them are the same word.

Ilan is sixty-one and he is a joiner, and he has run a small business for thirty-five years and delivered every job he ever quoted, on time, and he is the man people in that town call when something has to be right.

And he has been failing at this one project for nine years, and it is the only failure of his adult life, and he has never told a living soul that he keeps the book.

He would not say he thinks God has given up on him. He is more precise than that. He thinks he has been given a task, at conversion, the task of becoming what he is supposed to be, and that he has under-delivered on it for nine consecutive years, and that this is a fact about him rather than a mood.

He is out in the workshop most evenings. That book is on the shelf above the bench where he can see it.

If you are running your own life as a project, hear the question first, because everything hangs on it. Who did you understand the client to be?

The shortest verse about this in the New Testament

Paul finishes a letter with a prayer that the God of peace would sanctify these people wholly, and that their whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless. It is a large ask, larger than anything in Ilan's book.

And then, immediately after it, one short sentence.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.1 Thessalonians 5:24

Read the two halves and see who appears in each.

Faithful is he that calleth you. The one who did the calling is described by a single word: faithful. Not demanding. Not exacting. Reliable in the matter under discussion.

Who also will do it. And then the thing that undoes Ilan's whole notebook. The one who calls is also the one who does it. Paul has just prayed a huge prayer over these people and then immediately assigns the delivery of it to the one who called them, not to the ones being sanctified.

You are inside a job that the caller is doing, and it is already assigned to Him, and Paul put the delivery on His side of the line in the same breath as the prayer. I am not letting a competent man off a real responsibility. It is written in 1 Thessalonians 5:24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a one-line assignment of work and lays it on a man with a project book on a shelf.

He is not the contractor. He is the work.

And now the thing that will actually reach a joiner, because it is about roles and he has spent thirty-five years being clear about roles.

In every job Ilan has ever done there are three parties: the client, the contractor, and the work. He knows exactly what belongs to each. He has never in thirty-five years confused himself with a piece of oak.

But in this one project he has taken all three roles. He set the objectives, which is the client. He is delivering them, which is the contractor. And he is the material, which is the work.

That is not humility, and it is not diligence. It is a man doing three jobs, two of which were never his, and then filing a failure report against himself quarterly.

Scripture gives him one of the three. He is the work. The one who calls is the client and the contractor both.

You are the work and not the contractor, and it is already His job, and the material was never expected to deliver itself. Scripture says the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does what a man has been trying to do to himself with a ruled notebook.

What a joiner knows about wood

And there is a thing he knows in his hands that he has never once applied here.

Wood moves. Every board he has ever worked has moved, and it moves for reasons of season and moisture and where the tree stood, and a good joiner does not fight that. He allows for it. The whole craft is designing for a material that will not stay where you put it, and a man who insisted his oak be dimensionally stable would produce furniture that split.

Ilan has been running a project on a material that moves, with quarterly assessments, against fixed targets set in year two, by a man who did not yet know what he was working with.

He would never do that to a client. He would explain it to them, patiently, on site, with the board in his hands.

You are a material that moves and you were never expected to hold a fixed dimension, and He has been allowing for it from the beginning. It is written that He who calls you is faithful and He will do it, and the Holy Spirit is the one working with what a man actually is rather than what a notebook in year two specified.