The Hands That Still Know

The blackout drapes for the nursery have been on the workday list for two years, and this is the Saturday somebody finally brought a machine.

Nine people in the fellowship hall, two tables pushed together, three bolts of heavy cotton, a tin of pins, and a young man named Devon who has watched a video about it and is doing his sincere best. He is marking the hem in pencil with a tape measure, one mark at a time, and it is going to take him until Christmas, and it is going to ripple.

Lorna is at the other end of the hall with the coffee, and she has been watching for four minutes without meaning to. She goes down there to say one helpful thing. That is the whole intention. And then her hands do what her hands do.

She turns the cloth over. She folds the raw edge under with her thumb and runs it, and the fold is even for three feet without a single pin. She measures the depth of the hem with the width of two fingers because that is how deep it always is. She puts four pins in her mouth. She has not put pins in her mouth in nineteen years and her mouth knows exactly how to hold them. She sets the fold, pins the corner so the weight hangs right, drops the needle, and runs eight feet of blind hem in under a minute, and it lies flat as water.

The hall has gone quiet behind her. Devon says something admiring. Somebody else says, I did not know you could do that.

And Lorna says, without turning around, "I did it for eleven years."

She does not say the rest of it. Those eleven years were in a drapery workroom on the second floor of a building that is a parking garage now, making pinch pleats and blackout linings for hotel chains, forty-four hours a week, from nineteen to thirty, for a company that closed without notice on a Friday. She has thought of that decade ever since as the part before. The part that did not count. She has said out loud, more than once, that she wasted her twenties.

And here in a fellowship hall, with pins in her mouth, the only genuinely excellent thing she can do with her hands has just come straight up out of that decade, in front of nine people, and it will not go back down.

You know the workroom. Yours might be a job, a marriage, a town, a stretch of years you have filed under the part before. And you know the moment when something out of it turns up in your hands, in public, working perfectly, and you do not know where to put it.

The one place a trade is named out loud

There is a passage in Exodus most people read past, and it is the most surprising thing in the book about who God fills and what for. The tabernacle has to be built, and God names the man who will build it, out loud, and then says what He has done to him.

And he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.Exodus 35:31

Read that again, because the order is not what anybody expects. Filled with the Spirit of God, and then a list, and the last item on the list is workmanship. Not preaching. Not prophecy. Craft. And four verses later it stops being a category and becomes a trade directory.

Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver.Exodus 35:35

The embroiderer. The weaver. Blue, purple, scarlet, fine linen. That is a workroom. That is thread and cloth and somebody who knows how deep the hem goes without measuring it.

You are looking at the one place in Scripture where being filled by God is spelled out as a trade, and He spelled it out in cloth. The word names the engraver and the embroiderer and the weaver by their crafts (Exodus 35:35), and it is His Spirit doing the filling in that very sentence, which means the hands and the skill were never in a lesser category than the words and the singing.

Nobody in that camp thought a needle was a spiritual instrument. God did.

You have a skill God has never once called secular, and the word says so out loud in a list with His own dwelling place at the end of it. Exodus 35:31 puts the Spirit of God and all manner of workmanship in the same breath, and the same Spirit is the one who filled a man to cut stone and another to work thread, and neither of them had to apologize for the trade.

Where the gold came from

Now the awkward question, and Exodus does not flinch from it. Where did Bezaleel learn to work gold?

There was no goldsmithing school in the wilderness. Everything anybody in that camp knew about metal, dye, thread and fine linen, they learned in one place, and it was the place they had just walked out of. In slavery, in Egyptian workshops, on Egyptian projects, doing work that not one of them chose.

And the material was from there too. When they left, the Egyptians handed them silver, gold and clothing at the door (Exodus 12:35-36). Every ring and bracelet that went into the offering for the tabernacle came out of the house of bondage in somebody's bundle.

So the dwelling place of God in that camp was built out of Egyptian gold, by hands trained in Egyptian workshops, using skills learned in years nobody there would have chosen.

You are standing in a very old pattern, and it is the pattern of a God who does not throw away material. It is written into the whole construction of the tabernacle, and the Spirit who filled the builders is the same Spirit at work now, and He has never yet required a person to have acquired their skill somewhere respectable before He would use it.

Notice what God did not do. He did not give Bezaleel a new craft in a night, and He did not have the tabernacle drop out of the sky finished. He took a man with Egyptian training in his hands, filled him with His own Spirit, and put him to work on the holiest object in the nation.

You have hands that were trained where they were trained, and the training is already yours and already in use. Scripture put the filling and the workmanship in one verse (Exodus 35:31), and it is His Spirit who takes a trained hand and turns it toward what He is building, without erasing the years that trained it.

He does not issue new hands

Here is where somebody gets nervous, so let me be plain. Nothing here says the workroom years were good years, or that a person should be grateful for a bad decade. Lorna is not required to admire that building. It is a parking garage and she is not sentimental about it.

What Scripture says is something else, and it is sturdier. It says God builds with what is in the room.

Look at how the new birth is actually described. Born of the Spirit (John 3:6). A new heart, a new spirit, a life hid with Christ. Every one of those is about whose you are and what has been put in you. Not one of them is a wiped memory, a blank history, or a different pair of hands. There is no passage anywhere that hands somebody a new set of fingers and no recollection of how they learned.

You were not required to arrive with a clean history, and the word never asked for one. John 3:6 says that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and it is the Spirit who does that, quietly, in a person who walks out of the room afterward carrying every skill they walked in with.

You have permission to bring the whole trained hand, and it is already welcome, and it was welcome in the wilderness first. The word records that God filled workers for cloth and metal and stone (Exodus 35:35), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary trained skill do a holy job, without a single question about the workshop it came from.