The Last Time Somebody Saw It

The shed at the end of the yard on Bracken Row has a window that faces west, and from about seven in the evening until the light goes, everything on the bench turns the color of honey, and Tomas works in that hour more than any other because he can see the grain without the lamp on.

He builds ukuleles.

Not many. Four or five a year, and only when the wood tells him it is ready, which is a sentence he would never say out loud to another human being because of how it sounds. He bends the sides over a hot pipe. He cuts his own rosettes. He has a jar of offcuts from a mango tree that came down in the storm eleven years ago and he uses that wood about a quarter inch at a time, like a man spending the last of something.

Nobody has seen one in nine years.

His daughter has one. His brother in law has one, and does not play it, and keeps it on a stand in a room nobody sits in, which Tomas has decided not to have feelings about. Everything else that has come off that bench since is in the shed, in soft bags, on a rack he built for the purpose, in a row like a small quiet choir with the door shut on it.

The reason is nine years old and it takes about four minutes to tell and he has never told it.

He took one into a shop in the city. He had been building for six years by then and he thought, this is the one, this is the one that is actually good. The man behind the counter took it out of the bag and did not say hello. He turned it over. He put a light in the soundhole and looked inside for a long time, and then he set it on the counter and started talking, and he talked for eleven minutes, and two other men in the shop drifted over partway through and stayed.

The kerfing. The neck angle. The finish, which he described as ambitious. The bracing, which he said with a small laugh was a decision. He was not cruel. That is the thing Tomas has never been able to explain, even to himself. The man was not cruel, he was accurate, he knew a very great deal, and he took the whole thing apart in front of two strangers on a Tuesday afternoon and handed it back and said, keep at it.

Tomas said thank you. He put it in the bag. He drove home and did not stop anywhere, and he put the ukulele on the bench and did not touch it for three weeks, and when he did touch it again he took the strings off it and hung it on the wall of the shed where it still is.

He kept building. That is what he would want you to know if he were the sort of man who told you things. He did not quit. He has built maybe thirty since, and some of them are, he thinks, actually good, and he does not know for certain because there is no longer anybody who tells him.

There is no feed. There is no wall. There is a west window and an hour of honey light and a jar of mango wood going down a quarter inch at a time.

Last week the kid from two doors up, who is maybe eleven, stopped on the path outside and stood there with his bike, listening. Tomas had been playing while he worked, the way he does, not really playing, just checking a thing. He stopped when he saw the shadow. The kid said, sorry, and went. Tomas stood in the doorway for a minute afterward and then went back in and shut the door.

Who did the hiding

There is a line in Psalm 27 that people quote for the second half and skip the first half of, and the two halves are the same sentence.

For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.Psalm 27:5

He hides me. He sets me up. Same subject, same breath, no gap between them. The hiding is not the failure state before the setting up, and the setting up is not a reward for having endured the hiding well. They are two things God does and He does not apologize for either one.

You are hidden, and the hiding was never a punishment handed down for a bad Tuesday in a shop. I am not softening what happened to you. Psalm 27:5 says He hides me in His pavilion, and a pavilion is a royal tent, and the word is written that way on purpose: it is the shelter a king puts over his own. And the Holy Spirit does not read a shed with the door shut as a person in disgrace.

Something has to be said clearly here, because most messages on this subject cannot help themselves.

Nobody is going to tell you to post it. There is no push in this. Your privacy is not cowardice, and it is not a symptom, and a person who has been taken apart in front of two strangers and decided to work quietly for nine years afterward is not failing at anything. That is a reasonable adult protecting something real. It is honored here and it is not being corrected.

You have a covering, and Psalm 91:1 calls it a secret place and does not treat it as a waiting room. Scripture puts hiddenness in the vocabulary of shelter rather than the vocabulary of shame. What the Spirit adds is that this is not a metaphor about coping. It is a description of where you have actually been standing for nine years, in the honey light, with the door shut.

What the man in the shop was able to touch

Now the other half, and this is the part that has been getting confused since the Tuesday afternoon.

He touched a ukulele. That is the whole inventory of what he was able to reach. He was accurate about the kerfing and he may well have been right about the neck angle, and none of that constitutes a reading of you, because he did not have access to you. A man with a light and a good ear can assess an instrument. There is no tool in that shop that measures what God did in a person, and he was not attempting it, and if you had told him that was what happened he would have been baffled.

You have a light in you that nothing on that counter was able to reach. Colossians 3:3 says your life is hid with Christ in God, which is the same idea as the pavilion said a second way, and it is written, and written means it does not depend on the last person who had an opinion. The Spirit does not defer to expertise. He seats what the word already said, in a man standing at a bench with a hot pipe going.

So the eleven minutes were real, and the eleven minutes were about wood.

You were lit before you ever built anything, and you were lit on the drive home when you did not stop anywhere. Jesus said in Matthew 5:14 that you are the light of the world, and He said it to people who had never made a single thing anybody praised. The word said it first. The same Spirit says it again now, at seven in the evening, with the grain going the color of honey.