The Knife You Sharpened for Forty Years

The knife has a bone handle worn into the shape of one man's grip, and it has been sharpened so many times that the blade is half the width it started at.

He learned the grafting from his father, who learned it from his. Where to cut. How deep. Which limb takes and which one sulks for a season and then takes anyway. How to read a tree in February and know what it is planning for August.

Nobody taught him in words. There were not many words. There was a hand on his hand for four springs, and then there was not, and by then he knew.

Forty years of it. The grove up behind the house, six hundred trees, some of them older than the village road. He can tell you which ones his grandfather grafted, by the scar, from twenty paces off.

On Sunday his son comes home.

The son is a good man. He is not showing off and he is not being unkind. He carries the plates in without being asked and he laughs at the same old joke about the neighbor's goat. He is home because he wanted to be home.

And somewhere between the lamb and the tea, wanting to be gentle, wanting to prepare his father for something he thinks is coming, he says it.

Baba, the world is not going to need what you know.

Then he says something else, because nobody leaves a sentence like that lying on a table, and the evening carries on. The tea is poured. The goat joke gets told again by somebody else.

But the sentence stays where it landed.

He is awake at four. That is not new; he has been awake at four for thirty years, because that is when a man walks a grove. What is new is that at ten to five he is standing at the top row with the knife in his pocket and no reason to take it out, and the trees look, for the first time in his life, like an argument he has already lost.

Not sad. That would be easier to explain. Just weightless. A man holding forty years of knowing and unable to work out what it now weighs.

You have stood there.

Perhaps not in a grove. Perhaps in a stockroom, a workshop, a ward, a classroom, an office where the thing you were the best in the building at is now spoken of in the past tense by people who mean no harm. Perhaps nobody even said it out loud, and you assembled the sentence yourself from ten smaller ones.

Either way you know the four o'clock version of it, which is never about the trade at all. It is one short question wearing the trade's clothes.

If the world does not need what I know, what am I for.

The fear underneath the sentence

Notice what the sentence at supper actually did, because this matters more than whether it turns out to be right.

It did not attack the grove. It did not question one graft. It asked a question about need, and the man's whole footing turned out to be standing on that word without his ever having checked.

Useful, therefore wanted. Wanted, therefore here on purpose. That was the chain, unspoken, load bearing, forty years old. Pull the first link and the whole thing swings.

You are not the sum of what you can do, and you never were. Isaiah 43:1 says fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine, and every one of those clauses is a Person doing something to a person, with no trade named anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says it over a man at four in the morning when nothing else is speaking.

Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

Called by name. Not called by function.

You were named long before you were useful to anybody. Psalm 139:16 says in thy book all my members were written when as yet there was none of them, which puts the naming before the hands, before the skill, before the first spring with a knife in them, and the Holy Spirit did not wait for a man to become good at something before He knew what to call him.

That is not a consolation prize handed to a man whose trade has thinned out. It is the original order, restored to view. Usefulness was always the second thing. It only felt like the first because it kept arriving on time.

Your footing was never the forecast

Here is what this message is not going to do.

It is not going to tell you what the years ahead hold, for your grove or your trade or anybody's. It is not going to hand you a survey or a prediction or a reassuring guess, because a guess is exactly what put you on the top row at ten to five, and one more of them does not steady a man, it only changes which sentence he is awake at four thinking about.

You have not been made surplus in the house of God. 1 Corinthians 12:21 says the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee, and Scripture puts that sentence in a chapter about a body that the Holy Spirit Himself arranges, member by member, so being unnecessary is not a status available to anyone He has placed.

You are not required to know what is coming in order to stand up today. Psalm 31:15 says my times are in thy hand, and the sentence gives away the hand without giving away the timetable, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an actual rest rather than a phrase a man repeats while still calculating.

And underneath all of it, the steadiest thing in Scripture.

You have a Father who is not learning anything new this year. Malachi 3:6 says I am the Lord, I change not, and that is written in the middle of a book about a people whose world was being rearranged around them, and the Holy Spirit set it there for exactly the man standing in a grove at first light wondering what he now weighs.