I Left The Skills Line Empty

The volunteer table at the Marion County Fair sits in the shade at the corner of the poultry barn, and Loretta Pyle has run it every July since her kids were small. Two folding chairs. A plastic box of pens, most of which do not work. A clipboard with the sign up sheet on it, and a coffee can with a rock in it holding the sheet flat when the wind comes down the breezeway between the barns.

Curtis Beam is standing at that table at four in the afternoon with a pen in his hand.

He is fifty four. He had come across for a lemon shake up for his granddaughter, and Loretta caught him going by and said Curtis, we are short for Saturday, put your name down. So he did. Name. Phone. Church, if any. And then the last line on the sheet, which says SKILLS, and which is about an inch and a half long.

Curtis looks at that line for what turns into a while.

He can back a twenty four foot gooseneck into a gate opening with two inches on either side. He can hear a fan bearing going out three days before it goes. He can splice a hydraulic hose in a hayfield with what is in the toolbox. He has hauled for forty years: hay, hogs, feeder calves, folding chairs, a piano out of the Baptist church basement, three whole households worth of furniture for people moving in a hurry, and one casket in the bed of his truck in an ice storm in 2011 when the hearse could not get up Poplar Ridge and somebody had to.

None of that goes on that line. He knows what goes on that line, because he has watched people fill it in ahead of him for twenty years. Music. Children. Hospitality. Teaching. Prayer. Sign language. Somebody last year wrote counseling and Curtis had thought, well, there it is, that is what they mean by skills.

Down the midway a loudspeaker crackles and calls the swine show to ring two. A pen the color of nothing is in his hand. The line is an inch and a half long and it is going to stay empty, and he knows it, and he is still standing there.

Finally he hands the clipboard back to Loretta with the line blank.

"Just put me wherever," he says.

Loretta says that is fine and does not look at the sheet, because Loretta has known Curtis since the second grade and would have put him wherever anyway. And Curtis walks off through the straw toward the shake up stand, thinking a thought he would never say to another living person, which is that he has been in that church twenty six years and has never once had an answer for that line.

What is that in thine hand

There is a man in the book of Exodus standing at a burning bush making a case for why he is the wrong man. He is thorough about it. He is slow of speech. Nobody will listen to him. He has been out in the back of the desert forty years with sheep, and forty years with sheep is a long time to think about what you are not.

God does not argue with the case. He does not go point by point. He asks one question, and the question is about an object the man is already holding.

You are already holding the thing He asked about, and it was in your hand before the question ever got asked. I am not making that up to be encouraging. Exodus 4:2 puts the whole exchange in about nine words and the written word does not dress the answer up one bit. And the Holy Spirit does not go out and find a man a better object. He opens the hand that is already full.

And the LORD said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.Exodus 4:2

A rod. A stick. A piece of wood a shepherd leans on and knocks brush back with and reaches out to hook a sheep away from a ledge. It is the least remarkable thing at that bush. The bush is on fire and not burning up and the thing God asks about is the stick.

You have a hand that is not empty, and it has not been empty for forty years. That is written in Exodus 4:2, and Scripture does not soften it or explain the rod or apologize for it being a rod. What the Spirit adds, in the shade of a poultry barn at four in the afternoon in July, is that this is about you, standing there with the pen.

A rod is not a talent

Now here is where I want to be careful, because there is a lie that comes dressed up as a compliment and it is aimed straight at a man like Curtis.

The lie says: hauling is secretly a spiritual gift, and backing a gooseneck is really a ministry, and if you had eyes to see it you would realize you have been remarkable all along. That is flattery. Flattery is the same demand in a nicer coat, because it still says the ordinary thing had to turn out to be something else before it counted.

The rod did not turn into something else. It stayed a stick the whole way through. Read what happened at the Red Sea and it is still just a rod in the man's hand. Nothing about the wood got upgraded. What was different was whose hand it was in and who was doing the work, and the work was never the wood's.

You were never the raw material that had to be improved before God would move in the same county as you. Exodus 4:2 is the proof of it, because the written word records the question and the answer and then simply goes on with the story, as if a stick were a perfectly reasonable place to start. And the Spirit is not standing over you waiting for you to get better at something. He is agreeing with what the text already said.

That is the good news for a man at a folding table with a blank line, and it is better news than the flattery was. Flattery would have told Curtis he was special and he would not have believed it, because he has known himself for fifty four years. This tells him something he can actually receive, which is that special was never the requirement.

This is yours: an ordinary Saturday, an ordinary truck, and a light in you that was never yours to generate in the first place. Jesus said He is the light of the world in John 8:12 and then said the same sentence over people who owned boats and nets. The word said it first, and the Spirit says it again this afternoon, to the one standing in the straw with a pen that barely writes.